Page:Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius.djvu/185

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Treachery akin to Tarpeia's is familiar to the readers of the legends of many lands; and there is in the Norman-French legend of "Fulk Fitzwarin" in our own chronicles an account of the capture of Ludlow Castle, or Dynan, through the treachery of one Marion de la Bruere, who was led to it by a secret passion for a captive knight. Sir Ernald de Lisle.

We must barely glance at the two poems in which Propertius, with the same eye to early topography and to explanatory etymology, recounts the legends of Hercules and Cacus, and the origin of the title of Jupiter Feretrius. The former poem has a fine parallel in the eighth book of the 'Æneid;' the latter strikes the reader as an early effort of the poet, which would scarcely have been missed if it had not survived. With the foundation by Hercules of the Ara Maxima after his punishment of Cacus for stealing the oxen of Geryon, he connects the low part of the city called the Velabrum (where he and his oxen rested, and near which Cacus plied his nefarious trade), through the sails (vela) which the first inhabitants used to navigate the swamp. The so-called Forum