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Updated: May 5, 2025
The host fancied he called him Castellan because he took him for a "worthy of Castile," though he was in fact an Andalusian, and one from the strand of San Lucar, as crafty a thief as Cacus and as full of tricks as a student or a page. "In that case," said he, "'Your bed is on the flinty rock, Your sleep to watch alway;
Nothing, for example, could be keener and more cutting than the very just criticism he made in Bandinelli's presence of his "Hercules and Cacus." "Quel bestial buaccio Bandinello," as he delights to name him, could do nothing but retort with vulgar terms of insult. The great achievement of this third period was the modelling and casting of the "Perseus."
The three-headed Cacus is seen to be a near kinsman of Geryon's three-headed dog Orthros, and of the three-headed Kerberos, the hell-hound who guards the dark regions below the horizon.
The corrupted title Cacus was supposed to be identical with the Greek word kakos, meaning "evil" and the corruption was suggested by the epithet of Herakles, Alexikakos, or "the averter of ill."
The deep winding cavern on the face of the Aventine Hill, said to have been inhabited by the monstrous giant Cacus, the son of Vulcan, who vomited fire, and was the terror of the surrounding inhabitants, was evidently of volcanic origin; and the local tradition from which Virgil concocted his fable was undoubtedly derived from a vivid recollection of the active operations of a volcano.
In fact his voice was still for war, and he proposed to send expresses to Balmawhapple, Killancureit, Tulliellum, and other lairds, who were exposed to similar depredations, inviting them to join in the pursuit; 'and then, sir, shall these nebulones nequissimi, as Leslaeus calls them, be brought to the fate of their predecessor Cacus, "Elisos oculos, et siccum sanguine guttur."
Then the monster belched forth volumes of smoke and flame, concealing himself in a cloud of pitchy vapor. But Hercules now thoroughly enraged, rushed furiously into the den, and seizing Cacus by the throat, choked him to death. Great was the joy of the people when they heard of the destruction of the monster, and anniversary festivals had been held there ever since in honor of the deliverer.
Indignant at this I followed him, and speaking him fairly and civilly asked him to give me if it were only eight reals, for he knows I am an honest man and that I have neither profession nor property, for my parents never brought me up to any or left me any; but the rogue, who is a greater thief than Cacus and a greater sharper than Andradilla, would not give me more than four reals; so your worship may see how little shame and conscience he has.
Now, from this heavenly descent of criticism, and the close analogy it bears to heroic virtue, it is easy to assign the proper employment of a true, ancient, genuine critic: which is, to travel through this vast world of writings; to peruse and hunt those monstrous faults bred within them; to drag out the lurking errors, like Cacus from his den; to multiply them like Hydra's heads; and rake them together like Augeas's dung; or else to drive away a sort of dangerous fowl who have a perverse inclination to plunder the best branches of the tree of knowledge, like those Stymphalian birds that ate up the fruit.
His "Hercules and Cacus," while it deserves all the sarcasm hurled at it by Cellini, proves that Bandinelli could not rise above the wrestling bout of a porter and a coal-heaver.
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