At Telesia we look out, and muse on what might have been, if one Pontius had done otherwise than he did by the forks of Caudium, if another Pontius had fared otherwise than he fared at the gates of Rome herself. At our next halting-place we are called on, not to muse on what might have been, but on what was. At Beneventum we tread the battle-ground of Pyrrhos and Manfred, the ground of two of the greatest victories of the Rome of the earlier and the Rome of the later day. There we need not strive to call up the dim figures of men, like the older and the later Pontius, known by one action of their lives. The Epeirot and the Swabian stand out as clearly discerned figures in the history of their several ages. And the places where we next halt will show us the place of overthrow for both, the place of death and utter ruin for one. VII. Benevento. We follow the stream of Calore till we reach a city which, without ever having been one of the great cities of the world, without having been even one of the greatest cities of Italy, has always kept up an important historic being. Beneventum is a familiar name in all ages; yet Beneventum has never been either a mighty commonwealth like Venice or Genoa, or the head of a mighty kingdom like Naples and Palermo. It has had its princes; if we never heard of them before, we should learn a good deal of them by studying the monuments of their city. That is to say, the monuments will tell us a great deal about princes nine hundred or a thousand years back; no monument that we remember in Benevento tells us anything about the last prince who bore their title. Let us suppose a wanderer who began his travels at Autun and who finds himself, in the course of the same wandering, at Benevento. He will feel it as a grotesque coincidence that, not so very long ago, a man was living who had once been Prince of Benevento and who before that had been Bishop of Autun. Benevento, among many other things that it is, is also the later city of Talleyrand, as Autun is the earlier. But there is this difference that one thinks of Talleyrand at Autun and one does not think of him at Benevento. At Autun he has his place, though a very strange place, in the long succession of Bishops of Autun; at Benevento, though he bore the style of its prince, he stands all alone; we cannot find a niche for him in the succession of the Beneventan princes. Yet a prince of Benevento whose existence marks the ending for a season of the long papal dominion in Benevento reminds us that Benevento had its princes before that papal dominion began. It reminds us of the two distinctive features in the later history of the city. Benevento was first the seat of Lombard princes who, placed on the borders of both empires, contrived to escape all practical submission to either; it was then the seat of an outlying scrap of papal dominion surrounded on all sides by the Sicilian realm. In both these characters