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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1829. Excerpt:... SECT. III. Of the ancient kings of the Latins until jEneas-s coming. THE kings which reigned in Latium before the arrival of jEneas, were Saturnus, Picus, Faunus, and Latinus. Of Saturn there is nothing remembered, save what is mentioned already, and many fables of the Greeks, which whether they be appliable to this man, it is for him to judge who shall be able to determine whether this were the Saturn of the Greeks, called by them Kpivo;, or some other, styled Saturn by the aborigines. For the age wherein he lived may very well admit him to have been the same; but the names of u Sterces and Stercutius, (for it may be this name was not borrowed from the skill which he taught the people, but rather the soil which they laid on their grounds, had that appellation from him, ) do rather make him seem some other man. Of Picus it is said that he was a good horseman. The fable of his being changed into a bird, which we call a pie, may well seem (as it is interpreted) to have grown from the skill which he had in soothsaying, or divination, by the flight and chattering of fowls. Faunus the son of Picus reigned after his father. He gave to Evander the Arcadian (who having slain by mischance his father Echemus king of Arcadia, fled into Italy) the waste grounds on which Rome was afterward built. Fauna, called Fatua, the sister of Faunus, was also his wife, as all historians agree; she was held a prophetess, and highly commended for her chastity; which praise in her must needs have been much blemished by her marriage, itself being merely incestuous. It is not mentioned that Faunus had by his sister anv child, neither do we read of any other wife which he had, save only that Virgil, jEneid 7, gives unto him Latinus as his son, by a nymph called Marica. "Ezekiel often ca...