Lays of Ancient Rome Part 4

LX

No sound of joy or sorrow Was heard from either bank; But friends and foes in dumb surprise, With parted lips and straining eyes, Stood gazing where he sank; And when above the surges, They saw his crest appear, All Rome sent forth a rapturous cry, And even the ranks of Tuscany Could scarce forbear to cheer.

LXI

But fiercely ran the current, Swollen high by months of rain: And fast his blood was flowing; And he was sore in pain, And heavy with his armor, And spent with changing blows: And oft they thought him sinking, But still again he rose.

LXII

Never, I ween, did swimmer, In such an evil case, Struggle through such a raging flood Safe to the landing place: But his limbs were borne up bravely By the brave heart within, And our good father Tiber Bare bravely up his chin.

LXIII

"Curse on him!" quoth false s.e.xtus; "Will not the villain drown?

But for this stay, ere close of day We should have sacked the town!"

"Heaven help him!" quoth Lars Porsena "And bring him safe to sh.o.r.e; For such a gallant feat of arms Was never seen before."

LXIV

And now he feels the bottom; Now on dry earth he stands; Now round him throng the Fathers; To press his gory hands; And now, with shouts and clapping, And noise of weeping loud, He enters through the River-Gate Borne by the joyous crowd.

LXV

They gave him of the corn-land, That was of public right, As much as two strong oxen Could plough from morn till night; And they made a molten image, And set it up on high, And there is stands unto this day To witness if I lie.

LXVI

It stands in the Comitium Plain for all folk to see; Horatius in his harness, Halting upon one knee: And underneath is written, In letters all of gold, How valiantly he kept the bridge In the brave days of old.

LXVII

And still his name sounds stirring Unto the men of Rome, As the trumpet-blast that cries to them To charge the Volscian home; And wives still pray to Juno For boys with hearts as bold As his who kept the bridge so well In the brave days of old.

LXVIII

And in the nights of winter, When the cold north winds blow, And the long howling of the wolves Is heard amidst the snow; When round the lonely cottage Roars loud the tempest's din, And the good logs of Algidus Roar louder yet within;

LXIX

When the oldest cask is opened, And the largest lamp is lit; When the chestnuts glow in the embers, And the kid turns on the spit; When young and old in circle Around the firebrands close; When the girls are weaving baskets, And the lads are shaping bows;

LXX

When the goodman mends his armor, And trims his helmet's plume; When the goodwife's shuttle merrily Goes flashing through the loom; With weeping and with laughter Still is the story told, How well Horatius kept the bridge In the brave days of old.

The Battle of the Lake Regillus

The following poem is supposed to have been produced about ninety years after the lay of Horatius. Some persons mentioned in the lay of Horatius make their appearance again, and some appellations and epithets used in the lay of Horatius have been purposely repeated: for, in an age of ballad-poetry, it scarcely ever fails to happen, that certain phrases come to be appropriated to certain men and things, and are regularly applied to those men and things by every minstrel. Thus we find, both in the Homeric poems and in Hesiod, [several examples of common phrases, in Greek]. Thus, too, in our own national songs, Douglas is almost always the doughty Douglas; England is merry England; all the gold is red; and all the ladies are gay.

The princ.i.p.al distinction between the lay of Horatius and the lay of the Lake Regillus is that the former is meant to be purely Roman, while the latter, though national in its general spirit, has a slight tincture of Greek learning and of Greek superst.i.tion. The story of the Tarquins, as it has come down to us, appears to have been compiled from the works of several popular poets; and one, at least, of those poets appears to have visited the Greek colonies in Italy, if not Greece itself, and to have had some acquaintance with the works of Homer and Herodotus.

Many of the most striking adventures of the House of Tarquin, before Lucretia makes her appearance, have a Greek character. The Tarquins themselves are represented as Corinthian n.o.bles of the great House of the Bacchiadae, driven from their country by the tyranny of that Cypselus, the tale of whose strange escape Herodotus has related with incomparable simplicity and liveliness. Livy and Dionysius tell us that, when Tarquin the Proud was asked what was the best mode of governing a conquered city, he replied only by beating down with his staff all the tallest poppies in his garden. This is exactly what Herodotus, in the pa.s.sage to which reference has already been made, relates of the counsel given to Periander, the son of Cypselus. The stratagem by which the town of Gabii is brought under the power of the Tarquins is, again, obviously copied from Herodotus. The emba.s.sy of the young Tarquins to the oracle at Delphi is just such a story as would be told by a poet whose head was full of the Greek mythology; and the ambiguous answer returned by Apollo is in the exact style of the prophecies which, according to Herodotus, lured Croesus to destruction. Then the character of the narrative changes. From the first mention of Lucretia to the retreat of Porsena nothing seems to be borrowed from foreign sources. The villainy of s.e.xtus, the suicide of his victim, the revolution, the death of the sons of Brutus, the defence of the bridge, Musius burning his hand, Cloelia swimming through Tiber, seem to be all strictly Roman. But when we have done with the Tuscan wars, and enter upon the war with the Latines, we are again struck by the Greek air of the story. The Battle of the Lake Regillus is in all respects a Homeric battle, except that the combatants ride astride on their horses, instead of driving chariots. The ma.s.s of fighting men is hardly mentioned. The leaders single each other out, and engage hand to hand. The great object of the warriors on both sides is, as in the Iliad, to obtain possession of the spoils and bodies of the slain; and several circ.u.mstances are related which forcibly remind us of the great slaughter round the corpses of Sarpedon and Patroclus.

But there is one circ.u.mstance which deserves especial notice.

Both the war of Troy and the war of Regillus were caused by the licentious pa.s.sions of young princes, who were therefore peculiarly bound not to be sparing of their own persons on the day of battle. Now the conduct of s.e.xtus at Regillus, as described by Livy, so exactly resembles that of Paris, as described at the beginning of the third book of the Iliad, that it is difficult to believe the resemblance accidental. Paris appears before the Trojan ranks, defying the bravest Greek to encounter him:--

3 lines from the Iliad, in Greek, probably those translated by Pope as:

...to the van, before the sons of fame Whom Troy sent forth, the beauteous Paris came:

Livy introduces s.e.xtus in a similar manner: "Ferocem juvenem Tarquinium, ostentantem se in prima exsulum acie." Menelaus rushes to meet Paris. A Roman n.o.ble, eager for vengeance, spurs his horse towards s.e.xtus. Both the guilty princes are instantly terror-stricken:--

3 more lines in Greek, Pope's translation being:

...[Menelaus] approaching near, The beauteous champion views with marks of fear, Smit with a conscious sense, retires behind, And shuns the fate he well deserv'd to find.

"Tarquinius," says Livy, "retro in agmen suorum infenso cessit hosti." If this be a fortuitous coincidence, it is also one of the most extraordinary in literature.

In the following poem, therefore, images and incidents have been borrowed, not merely without scruple, but on principle, from the incomparable battle-pieces of Homer.

The popular belief at Rome, from an early period, seems to have been that the event of the great day of Regillus was decided by supernatural agency. Castor and Pollux, it was said, had fought armed and mounted, at the head of the legions of the commonwealth, and had afterwards carried the news of the victory with incredible speed to the city. The well in the Forum at which they had alighted was pointed out. Near the well rose their ancient temple. A great festival was kept to their honor on the Ides of Quintilis, supposed to be the anniversary of the battle; and on that day sumptuous sacrifices were offered to them at the public charge. One spot on the margin of Lake Regillus was regarded during many ages with superst.i.tious awe. A mark, resembling in shape a horse's hoof, was discernible in the volcanic rock; and this mark was believed to have been made by one of the celestial chargers.

How the legend originated cannot now be ascertained; but we may easily imagine several ways in which it might have originated; nor is it at all necessary to suppose, with Julius Frontinus, that two young men were dressed up by the Dictator to personate the sons of Leda. It is probable that Livy is correct when he says that the Roman general, in the hour of peril, vowed a temple to Castor. If so, nothing could be more natural than that the mult.i.tude should ascribe the victory to the favor of the Twin G.o.ds. When such was the prevailing sentiment, any man who chose to declare that, in the midst of the confusion and slaughter, he had seen two G.o.dlike forms on white horses scattering the Latines, would find ready credence. We know, indeed, that in modern times a very similar story actually found credence among a people much more civilized than the Romans of the fifth century before Christ. A chaplain of Cortes, writing about thirty years after the conquest of Mexico, in an age of printing presses, libraries, universities, scholars, logicians, jurists, and statesmen, had the face to a.s.sert that, in one engagement against the Indians, St. James had appeared on a gray horse at the head of the Castilian adventurers. Many of those adventurers were living when this lie was printed. One of them, honest Bernal Diaz, wrote an account of the expedition. He had the evidence of his own senses against the legend; but he seems to have distrusted even the evidence of his own senses. He says that he was in the battle, and that he saw a gray horse with a man on his back, but that the man was, to his thinking, Francesco de Morla, and not the ever-blessed apostle St. James. "Nevertheless,"

Bernal adds, "it may be that the person on the gray horse was the glorious apostle St. James, and that I, sinner that I am, was unworthy to see him." The Romans of the age of Cincinatus were probably quite as credulous as the Spanish subjects of Charles the Fifth. It is therefore conceivable that the appearance of Castor and Pollux may be become an article of faith before the generation which had fought at Regillus had pa.s.sed away. Nor could anything be more natural than that the poets of the next age should embellish this story, and make the celestial hors.e.m.e.n bear the tidings of victory to Rome.

Many years after the temple of the Twin G.o.ds had been built in the Forum, an important addition was made to the ceremonial by which the state annually testified its grat.i.tude for their protection. Quintus Fabius and Publius Decius were elected Censors at a momentous crisis. It had become absolutely necessary that the cla.s.sification of the citizens should be revised. On that cla.s.sification depended the distribution of political power.

Party spirit ran high; and the republic seemed to be in danger of falling under the dominion either of a narrow oligarchy or of an ignorant and headstrong rabble. Under such circ.u.mstances, the most ill.u.s.trious patrician and the most ill.u.s.trious plebeian of the age were entrusted with the office of arbitrating between the angry factions; and they performed their arduous task to the satisfaction of all honest and reasonable men.

One of their reforms was the remodelling of the equestrian order; and, having effected this reform, they determined to give to their work a sanction derived from religion. In the chivalrous societies of modern times,--societies which have much more than may at first sight appear in common with with the equestrian order of Rome,--it has been usual to invoke the special protection of some Saint, and to observe his day with peculiar solemnity. Thus the Companions of the Garter wear the image of St. George depending from their collars, and meet, on great occasions, in St. George's Chapel. Thus, when Louis the Fourteenth inst.i.tuted a new order of chivalry for the rewarding of military merit, he commended it to the favor of his own glorified ancestor and patron, and decreed that all the members of the fraternity should meet at the royal palace on the feast of St. Louis, should attend the king to chapel, should hear ma.s.s, and should subsequently hold their great annual a.s.sembly. There is a considerable resemblance between this rule of the order of St. Louis and the rule which Fabius and Decius made respecting the Roman knights. It was ordained that a grand muster and inspection of the equestrian body should be part of the ceremonial performed, on the anniversary of the battle of Regillus, in honor of Castor and Pollux, the two equestrian G.o.ds.

All the knights, clad in purple and crowned with olive, were to meet at a temple of Mars in the suburbs. Thence they were to ride in state to the Forum, where the temple of the Twins stood. This pageant was, during several centuries, considered as one of the most splendid sights of Rome. In the time of Dionysius the cavalcade sometimes consisted of five thousand hors.e.m.e.n, all persons of fair repute and easy fortune.

There can be no doubt that the Censors who inst.i.tuted this august ceremony acted in concert with the Pontiffs to whom, by the const.i.tution of Rome, the superintendence of the public worship belonged; and it is probable that those high religious functionaries were, as usual, fortunate enough to find in their books or traditions some warrant for the innovation.

The following poem is supposed to have been made for this great occasion. Songs, we know, were chanted at religious festivals of Rome from an early period, indeed from so early a period that some of the sacred verses were popularly ascribed to Numa, and were utterly unintelligible in the age of Augustus. In the Second Punic War a great feast was held in honor of Juno, and a song was sung in her praise. This song was extant when Livy wrote; and, though exceedingly rugged and uncouth, seemed to him not wholly dest.i.tute of merit. A song, as we learn from Horace, was part of the established ritual at the great Secular Jubilee. It is therefore likely that the Censors and Pontiffs, when they had resolved to add a grand procession of knights to the other solemnities annually performed on the Ides of Quintilis, would call in the aid of a poet. Such a poet would naturally take for his subject the battle of Regillus, the appearance of the Twin G.o.ds, and the inst.i.tution of their festival. He would find abundant materials in the ballads of his predecessors; and he would make free use of the scanty stock of Greek learning which he had himself acquired. He would probably introduce some wise and holy Pontiff enjoining the magnificent ceremonial which, after a long interval, had at length been adopted. If the poem succeeded, many persons would commit it to memory. Parts of it would be sung to the pipe at banquets. It would be peculiarly interesting to the great Posthumian House, which numbered among its many images that of the Dictator Aulus, the hero of Regillus.

The orator who, in the following generation, p.r.o.nounced the funeral panegyric over the remains of Lucius Posthumius Megellus, thrice Consul, would borrow largely from the lay; and thus some pa.s.sages, much disfigured, would probably find their way into the chronicles which were afterwards in the hands of Dionysius and Livy.

Antiquaries differ widely as to the situation of the field of battle. The opinion of those who suppose that the armies met near Cornufelle, between Frascati and the Monte Porzio, is at least plausible, and has been followed in the poem.

As to the details of the battle, it has not been thought desirable to adhere minutely to the accounts which have come down to us. Those accounts, indeed, differ widely from each other, and, in all probability, differ as widely from the ancient poem from which they were originally derived.

It is unnecessary to point out the obvious imitations of the Iliad, which have been purposely introduced.