On Mars the currently important event was of a different sort.  The discorporate Old Ones had decided almost absent-mindedly to send the nestling human to grok what he could of the third planet, then turned attention back to serious matters.  Shortly before, around the time of the Terran Caesar Augustus, a Martian artist had been engaged in composing a work of art.  It could have been called with equal truth a poem, a musical opus, or a philosophical treatise; it was a series of emotions arranged in tragic, logical necessity.  Since it could have been experienced by a human only in the sense in which a man blind from birth could have a sunset explained to him, it does not matter much to which category of human creativity it might be assigned.  The important point was that the artist had accidentally discorporated before he finished his masterpiece.