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"Well, Captain, what the ancients dared not undertake, this junction between the two seas, which will shorten the road from Cadiz to India, M. Lesseps has succeeded in doing; and before long he will have changed Africa into an immense island." "Yes, M. Aronnax; you have the right to be proud of your countryman. Such a man brings more honour to a nation than great captains.
For example, his opinion of the insatiable avarice of Sieyes is well known; yet when he proposed, in his message to the Council of Ancients, to give his colleague, under the title of national recompense, the price of his obedient secession, it was, in the words of the message, a recompense worthily bestowed on his disinterested virtues.
Our physical well-being, our moral worth, our social happiness, our political tranquillity, all depend on that control of all our appetites and passions which the ancients designed by the cardinal virtue of temperance. The only real question to our present purpose, with regard to the higher classes, is, How stands the account of their stock, as it consists in wealth of every description?
There were others who gave it situations widely remote, such as in the Trapoban of the ancients, at present known as the island of Ceylon; or in the island of Sumatra; or in the Fortunate or Canary islands; or in one of the islands of Sunda; or in some favored spot under the equinoctial line.
Yet, my dear and esteemed friend, there is a dignified and tranquillizing philosophy in the writings of the ancients which ought to teach me a better condition of mind; and when I have risen from the lofty, albeit, somewhat melancholy strain, which swells through the essays of the graceful and tender Cicero, I have indeed felt a momentary satisfaction at my studies, and an elation even at the petty success with which I have cherished them.
Consent, Mfondolo, who might be my brother lion, pouncing upon army after army, as the lion pounces upon the antelope. I have shown you the Zimbabwe, the stone cities of the ancients. With slaves we will dig the gold out of the quartz reefs, buy guns from the Arabs, and drive these little yellow-skinned white men back into the sea.
The ancients believed in the existence of such persons; but in the Middle Ages the metamorphosis was supposed to be a phenomenon of daily occurrence, and even at the present day, in secluded portions of Europe, the superstition is still cherished by peasants. The belief, moreover, is supported by a vast amount of evidence, which can neither be argued nor pooh-poohed into insignificance.
Nor in this do I glance at the composers of centos, who declare themselves for such; of which sort of writers I have in my time known many very ingenious, and particularly one under the name of Capilupus, besides the ancients.
I prefer Diogenes Laertius to Plutarch, and if I were especially interested in any of the illustrious ancients of whom they write, I should vastly prefer the letters of the men themselves, if any existed, or otherwise the gossip of their tentmakers or washerwomen, to any lives written of them by either Diogenes Laertius or Plutarch.
Finer and more ornamental varieties of volcanic stone were introduced from a distance, such as the peperino or grayish-green tufa of the Alban Hills, the Lapis Albanus of the ancients, with its glittering particles of mica interspersed throughout its mass; the hard basaltine lava from a quarry near the tomb of Cæcilia Metella, on the Appian Way, and from the bed of the Lago della Colonna, once the celebrated Lake Regillus, to which the name of Lapis Tusculanus or Selce was given; and the Lapis Gabinus or Sperone, a compact volcanic concrete found in the neighbourhood of the ancient Gabii on the road to Tivoli, extensively used in the construction of the earliest monuments, particularly the Tabularium and the huge Arco de Pantani.
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