"This city, mistress of the whole earth and sea, which the Romans now inhabit, is said to have had as its earliest occupants the barbarian Sicels, a native race. As to the condition of the place before their time, whether it was occupied by others or uninhabited, none can certainly say. But some time later the Aborigines gained possession of it, having taken it from the occupants after a long war. These people had previously lived on the mountains in unwalled villages and scattered groups; but when the Pelasgians,⁠ with whom some other Greeks had united, assisted them in the war against their neighbours, they drove the Sicels out of this place, walled in many towns, and contrived to subjugate all the country that lies between the two rivers, the Liris and the Tiber...Till the time of the Trojan war they preserved their ancient name of Aborigines; but under Latinus, their king, who reigned at the time of that war, they began to be called Latins, and when Romulus founded the city named after himself sixteen generations after the taking of Troy, they took the name which they now bear. And in the course of time they contrived to raise themselves from the smallest nation to the greatest and from the most obscure to the most illustrious, not only by their humane reception of those who sought a home among them, but also by sharing the rights of citizenship with all who had been conquered by them in war after a brave resistance, by permitting all the slaves, too, who were manumitted among them to become citizens, and by disdaining no condition of men from whom the commonwealth might reap an advantage, but above everything else by their form of government, which they fashioned out of their many experiences, always extracting something useful from every occasion."

"But the most learned of the Roman historians, among whom is Porcius Cato, who compiled with the greatest care the "origins"⁠ of the Italian cities, Gaius Sempronius⁠ and a great many others, say that they were Greeks, part of those who once dwelt in Achaia, and that they migrated many generations before the Trojan war. But they do not go on to indicate either the Greek tribe to which they belonged or the city from which they removed, or the date or the leader of the colony, or as the result of what turns of fortune they left their mother country; and although they are following a Greek legend, they have cited no Greek historian as their authority. It is uncertain, therefore, what the truth of the matter is. But if what they say is true, the Aborigines can be a colony of no other people but of those who are now called Arcadians; for these were the first of all the Greeks to cross the Ionian Gulf, under the leadership of Oenotrus, the son of Lycaon, and to settle in Italy...Oenotrus left Greece because he was dissatisfied with his portion of his father's land; for, as Lycaon had twenty-two sons, it was necessary to divide Arcadia into as many shares. For this reason Oenotrus left the Peloponnesus, prepared a fleet, and crossed the Ionian Gulf with Peucetius, one of his brothers. They were accompanied by many of their own people — for this nation is said to have been very populous in early times — and by as many other Greeks as had less land than was sufficient for them. Peucetius landed his people above the Iapygian Promontory, which was the first part of Italy they made, and settled there; and from him the inhabitants of this region were called Peucetians. But Oenotrus with the greater part of the expedition came into the other sea that washes the western regions along the coast of Italy; it was then called the Ausonian Sea, from the Ausonians who dwelt beside it, but after the Tyrrhenians became masters at sea its name was changed to that which it now bears."

"Still others have a story to the effect that they were colonists sent out by those Ligurians who are neighbours of the Umbrians. For the Ligurians inhabit not only many parts of Italy but some parts of Gaul as well, but which of these lands is their native country is not known, since nothing certain is said of them further."

"There are some who affirm that the Aborigines, from whom the Romans are originally descended, were natives of Italy, a stock which came into being spontaneously...and these authors say that they were first called Aborigines because they were the founders of the p33 families of their descendants, or, as we should call them, genearchai or prôtogonoi.⁠ Others claim that certain vagabonds without house or home, coming together out of many places, met one another there by chance and took up their abode in the fastnesses, living by robbery and grazing their herds. And these writers change their name, also, to one more suitable to their condition, calling them Aberrigenes,⁠ to show that they were wanderers; indeed, according to these, the race of the Aborigines would seem to be no different from those the ancients called Leleges; for this is the name they generally gave to the homeless and mixed peoples who had no fixed abode which they could call their country.⁠"

"Pale maids with passionless purity adorn Prim Vesta's temple."

""Lucifer," is the pale morning-star, the precursor of the full blaze of the noon-day sun--the "Eosphoros" of the Greeks. It shines timidly at dawn to gather forces and dazzle the eye after sunset as its own brother "Hesperos"--the radiant evening star, or the planet Venus... Piously inclined readers may argue that "Lucifer" is accepted by all the churches as one of the many names of the Devil. According to Milton's superb fiction, Lucifer is Satan, the "rebellious" angel, the enemy of God and man. If one analyzes his rebellion, however, it will be found of no worse nature than an assertion of free-will and independent thought, as if Lucifer had been born in the XIXth century. This epithet of "rebellious" is a theological calumny, on a par with that other slander of God by the Predestinarians, one that makes of deity an "Almighty" fiend worse than the "rebellious" Spirit himself; "an omnipotent Devil desiring to be 'complimented' as all merciful when he is exerting the most fiendish cruelty," as put by J. Cotter Morison. Both the foreordaining and predestining fiend-God, and his subordinate agent are of human invention; they are two of the most morally repulsive and horrible theological dogmas that the nightmares of light-hating monks have ever evolved out of their unclean fancies."

"An object that has no will of its own, capable, if need be, of opposing its creator, and with no qualities other than its creator’s, such an object has no independent existence and is incapable of ethical decision…. Therefore Lucifer was perhaps the one who best understood the divine will struggling to create a world and who carried out that will most faithfully. For, by rebelling against God, he became the active principle of a creation which opposed to God a counter-will of its own."

"Lucifer began, mythologically, as a heavenly detective. He was the lawyer retained by the gods for the suppression of vice; and, from long engaging in that business, he came to love it. When he had nobody to accuse, he was in distress, and went about accusing innocent people. So he was called the Accuser. And then he fell lower still, and went about tempting people to sin, in order that he might prosecute them; and then he was called Satan. That was the course of the first Vice Society, and the end of its attorney."

"They date from the Medieval age, the period of mental obscuration, during which most of the present prejudices and superstitions have been forcibly inoculated on the human mind...So deeply rooted, indeed, is this preconception and aversion to the name of Lucifer--meaning no worse than "light-bringer" (from lux, lucis, "light," and ferre "to bring"), It was Gregory the Great who was the first to apply this passage of Isaiah, "How art thou fallen from Heaven, Lucifer, son of the morning," etc., to Satan, ever since the bold metaphor of the prophet, which referred, after all, but to an Assyrian King inimical to the Israelites, has been applied to the Devil." ] --even among the educated classes, that by adopting it for the title of their magazine the editors have the prospect of a long strife with public prejudice before them. So absurd and ridiculous is that prejudice, indeed, that no one has seemed to ever ask himself the question, how came Satan to be called a light-bringer, unless the silvery rays of the morning-star can in any way be made suggestive of the glare of the infernal flames."