Here, then, was a coincidence involving a very curious mystery. About the facts there could be no mistake. Two strangers, of remarkable feature, find their burial, against all usage, in the tumulus of an ancient Etruscan family. Both are young, of different sexes, and both are Roman. Their features are carved above their dust, in immortal marble—we may almost call it so, which, after two thousand years, still preserves its trust—and, in an awful procession of souls to judgment, delineated by a hand of rare excellence, and with rare precision, we find the same persons, drawn to the life, and in the custody, as doomed victims, of the terrible fiend of Etruscan mythology. To this condition some terrible tale was evidently attached. Both of these pictures were portraits. For that matter, all were portraits in the numerous collection. With those two exceptions, the rest were of the same family, and their several fates, according to the resolve of the painter, were all felicitous. They walked erect, triumphant in hope and consciousness, elastic in their tread, and joyous in their features. Not so these two: the outcasts of the group—_with_ but not _of_ them—painfully contrasted by the artist—terribly so by the doom of the awful providence whose decree he had ventured thus freely to declare. The features of the man had the expression of one whom a just self-esteem moves to submit in dignity, and without complaint. The face of the woman, on the contrary, is full of anguish, though still distinguished by a degree of loftiness and character to which his offers no pretension. There were the portraits, and there the effigies, and beneath them, in their stone coffins, lay the fragments of their mouldering bones—the relic of two thousand years. What a scene had the artist chosen to transmit to posterity—from real life—and with what motive? By what terrible sense of justice, or by what strange obliquity of judgment and feeling, did the great Lucumo of the Pomponii, suffer the members of his family to be thus offensively perpetuated to all time, in the place of family sepulture? Could it have been the inspiration of revenge and hatred, by which this vivid and terrible representation was wrought; and what was the melancholy history of these two strangers—so young, so beautiful—thus doomed to the inexpiable torments of the endless future, by the bold anticipatory awards of a successor, or a contemporary? To these questions our explorers of the “Grotta del Tifoné” did not immediately find an answer. That they have done so since, the reader will ascribe to the keen anxiety with which they have groped through ancient chronicles in search of an event which, thus wondrously preserved by art for a period of more than twenty centuries, could not, as they well conjectured, be wholly obliterated from all other mortal records. CHAPTER II. _The Etrurian Captive at Rome._