Count Ælius was a man of the best Roman type, a man of “primitive virtue,” as the classical writers would have put it, though this virtue had been softened, refined, and purified by civilizing and instructing influences, of which the old Roman heroes—the Fabiuses, the Catos, the Scipios—had known nothing. In the antiquity of his lineage there was scarcely a man in the Empire who could pretend to compare with him. For the most part, the old houses from which had come the Consuls and Dictators of the Republic had died out. The old nobility had gone, and the new nobility had followed it. The great name of Fabius, saved by an accident from extinction, when its three hundred gallant sons, each of them “fit to command an army,” perished in one day by the craft of the Etruscan foe, had passed away. There was no living representative of the conqueror of Carthage, or of the conqueror of Corinth. Even the _parvenus_ of the Empire had in their turn disappeared. The generals and senators, both of the old Rome and of the new,(12) bore names which would have sounded strange and barbarous to Cicero or even to Tacitus. An Ælius then, one who claimed to trace his descent to a time even earlier than the legendary age, to a race which was domiciled in Italy long before even Æneas had brought thither the gods of Troy, was an almost singular phenomenon in a generation of new men. And nothing less than this was the pedigree claimed by the Ælii. Their remotest ancestor—the Count never could hear an allusion to it without a smile—was the famous cannibal king who ruled over the Laestrygones, a tribe of Western Italy,(13) and from whose jaws the prudent Ulysses so narrowly escaped. The pride of ancient descent is not particular as to the character of a progenitor, so he be sufficiently remote; and one branch of the Ælii had always delighted to recall by their surname their connection with this man-eating hero. But the race had not lacked glories of its own in historical times. They had had soldiers, statesmen, and men of letters among them. One of them had been made immortal by the friendship of Horace. Another, an adopted son, it was true, better known by the famous name of Sejanus, had nearly made himself master of the throne of the Cæsars. About a hundred years later this crowning glory of human ambition had fallen to it in the person of Hadrian, third in the list of the “five good Emperors”;(14) though indeed there were purists in the matter of genealogy who stoutly denied that this great soldier and scholar had any of the real Ælian blood in him.