What we may call a European manvantara or major cycle of activity—­the one that preceded this present one—­should have begun about 870 B. C. Its first age of splendor, of which we know anything, began in Greece about 390 years afterwards; we may conveniently take 478, the year Athens attained the hegemony, as the date of its inception.  Our present European manvantara began while Frederick II was forcing a road for civilization up from the Moslem countries through Italy; we may take 1240 as a central and convenient date.  The first 390 years of it—­from 1240 to 1632—­saw Dante and all the glories of the Cinquecento in Italy; Camoens and the era of the great navigators in Portugal; Cervantes and his age in Spain; Elizabeth and Shakespeare in England.  That will suggest to us that the Periclean was not the first age of splendor in Europe in that former manvantara; it will suggest how much we may have lost through the loss of all records of cultural effort in northern and western Europe during the four centuries that preceded Pericles.  Of course we cannot certainly say that there were such ages of splendor.  But we shall see presently that during every century since Pericles—­during the whole historical period—­there has been an age of splendor somewhere; and that these have followed each other with such regularity, upon such a definite geographical and chronological plan, that unless we accept the outworn conclusion that at a certain time—­about 500 B. C.—­the nature of man and the laws of nature and history underwent radical change, we shall have to believe that the same thing had been going on—­the recurrence of ages of splendor—­back into the unknown night of time.  And that geographical and chronological plan will show us that such ages were going on in unknown Europe during the period we are speaking of.  In the manvantara 2980 to 1480 B.C., did the Western Laya Center play the part in Europe, that the Southern one did in the manvantara 870 B.C. to 630 A.D.?  Was the Celtic Empire then, what the roman Empire became in the later time?  If so, their history after the pralaya 1480 to 870 may have been akin to that of the Latin, in this present cycle; no longer a united empire, they may have achieved something comparable to the achievements of France, Spain, and Italy in the later Middle Ages.  At least we hear the rumblings of their marches and the far shoutings of their aimless victories until within a century or two of the Christian era.  Then, what was Italy like in the heyday of the Etruscans, or under the Roman kings?  The fall of Tarquin—­an Etruscan—­was much more epochal, much more disastrous, than Livy guessed.  There were more than seven kings of Rome; and their era was longer than from 753 to 716; and Rome—­or perhaps the Etruscan state of which it formed a part—­was a much greater power then, than for several centuries after their fall.  The great works they left are an indication.  But only the vaguest traditions of that time came down to Livy.  The Celts sacked