Pyramids stand in a circle, and are connected at the top by a brazen ring on which, of course in the intervals, other pyramids of huge base are standing; and so on in several stories, a pyramid of pyramids, which indeed could not have stood firm, but must needs have fallen to the ground, furnished too with bells, and other things of the same kind. It is inconceivable how Varro, and above all, how such a practical man as Pliny could have believed in day dreams like these: even a child may see that this is not possible. The impossibility is yet more confirmed by the fact that neither of them beheld any more traces of such a work, of which the ruins must have existed even to this day, as in Babylon those of the temple of Belus. Quatremere de Quincy has had the unfortunate idea of trying to restore this edifice in an architectural elevation. There may have been a historical Porsena who was made mythical, like our Siegfried, who was placed in quite a different time from the true one; or _vice versa_ there was a mythical Porsena who was brought into history. We may safely deny the historical character of all that is told concerning this war: it has a thoroughly poetical appearance. How much this was the case, becomes evident when we view the tale in its simple form, stripped of the additions taken from the annalists. It is peculiar to all these poems, that they do not at all tally with other historical data. According to the general tradition, the Etruscans are suddenly seen on the Janiculum, and the Romans flee across the river. The poem does not even speak of the conquest of the Janiculum; but the Etruscan army appears at once on the banks of the Tiber, ready to pass the _pons Sublicius_. Here three Roman heroes stand against them; Horatius Cocles, Sp. Lartius and T. Herminius,--in all likelihood a personification of the three tribes. These resist whilst the Romans are breaking down the bridge; then two of the heroes, Lartius and Herminius, go away, and the first, one of the Ramnes, alone withstands the enemy. On this the story is told, how the Etruscans cross the river, and the consuls enticed them into an ambush on the Gabinian road. This tale is entirely borrowed from the Veientine war of 275, in which the self-same thing happens. The annalists transferred it because it did not seem to them satisfactory that the poem should not have known any thing of the war beyond the defence of the bridge. The whole account in Livy has a ridiculous exactness; the characters are the ever recurring Valerius, Lartius, and Herminius. But we find Porsena on the Janiculum; how then is it possible that Rome could have been visited by a famine such as must be presupposed for the story of Mucius Scævola, if the Etruscans lay only on that hill? The plunderers on that side of the stream could easily be kept at bay. In Livy nothing more is mentioned but that Porsena carries on the war alone; in Dionysius he makes his appearance leagued with the Latins under Octavius