Of late years it has become the fashion to claim the myth as genuine Italian, in spite of its Graeco-Oriental character, on the evidence of comparative mythology[825]: but no explanation is forthcoming of its unique character among Italian myths, all of which have a marked practical tendency, and a relation to some human institution such as the foundation of a city. They are legends of human beings and practices: this is an elemental myth familiar in different forms to the Eastern mind. Again, the Hercules of the myth has nothing in common with the genuine Italian Hercules, whom we may now accept as = genius, or the masculine principle—as may be seen from the sorry lameness of the attempt to harmonize the two[826]. Beyond doubt there was an Italian spirit or deity to whom the name Hercules was attached: but there is no need to force all the forms of Hercules that meet us into exact connexion with the genuine one. We have seen above that the Hercules of the _ara maxima_ may possibly have concealed Mars himself, in his original form of a deity of cattle, pasture, and clearings. But there is yet another possible explanation of this tangled problem. The Roman form of the Cacus-myth, in which Cacus steals the cattle from Hercules, and tries to conceal his theft by dragging them backwards into his cave by their tails, has recently been found in Sicily depicted on a painted vase, whither, as Professor Gardner has suggested, it may have been brought by way of Cyprus by Phoenician traders[827]; and the inference of so cautious an archaeologist is, apparently, that the myth may have found its way from Sicily to the Tiber. Nothing can be more probable; for it is certain that even before the eighth century B.C. the whole western coast of Italy was open first to Phoenician trade and then to Greek. And we are interested to find that the only other traces of the myth to be found in Italy are located in places which would be open to the same influence. From Capua we have a bronze vase on which is depicted what seems to be the punishment of Cacus by Hercules[828]; and a fragment of the annalist Gellius gives a story connecting Cacus with Campania, Etruria, and the East[829]. At Tibur also, which claimed a Greek origin, there is a faint trace of the myth in an inscription[830].