Page:The Satire of Seneca on the Apotheosis of Claudius.djvu/150

 afraid of those fellows. His last words that were heard among men were these, after a louder utterance in the locality where he expressed himself the more easily: “Oh, dear! I think I have hurt myself.” Whether he had, I don’t know; at any rate he was in the habit of hurting everything.

What happened afterward on earth it is superfluous to describe. For you know very well, and there is no danger that things which the universal joy had impressed upon the memory will slip from it; no one forgets his own good fortune. Listen to what happened in heaven: it is on the authority of the narrator. The news was brought to Jupiter that somebody had come, a rather tall man, quite gray-headed; that he was threatening something or other, for he kept shaking his head; and that he limped with his right foot. The messenger said he had asked of what nation he was, but his answer was mumbled in some kind of an incoherent noise; he didn’t recognize the man’s language, but he wasn’t either Greek or Roman or of any known race. Then Jupiter told Hercules, who had travelled all over the world and was supposed to be acquainted with all the nations, to go and find out what sort of a man it was. Hercules at the first sight was a good deal disturbed, even though he was one who didn’t fear any sort of monsters. When he beheld the aspect of this unknown specimen, its extraordinary gait, its voice belonging to no earthly creature but more like that of the monsters of the