SCOTT EVIL: Thank you. I mean, hey, but this is totally not real. Like, how many archers you got there, Mister Tuscan General? As a young man he composed the ballads Ivry and The Armada, which he later included as part of Lays of Ancient Rome, a series of very popular ballads about heroic episodes in Roman history which he composed in India and published in 1842. The Armada was sent by Philip II of Spain with the goal of conveying an army of invasion to England, and deposing the Protestant Queen Elizabeth. The supposedly invincible fleet was thwarted by a combination of vigilance, tactics that took advantage of the size and poor maneuverability of the Armada's ships, and a series of other misfortunes. The Lays were composed by Macaulay in his thirties, during his spare time while he was the "legal member" of the Governor-General of India's Supreme Council from 1834 to 1838. He later wrote of them: The Roman ballads are preceded by brief introductions, discussing the legends from a scholarly perspective. Macaulay explains that his intention was to write poems resembling those that might have been sung in ancient times.

Langworth, Richard M. (15 March 2018). " "Then Out Spake Brave Horatius": A Review of "Darkest Hour" ". winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu. Hillsdale College . Retrieved 16 July 2021. Lays of Ancient Rome has been reprinted on numerous occasions. An 1881 edition, lavishly illustrated by John Reinhard Weguelin, has frequently been republished. Countless schoolchildren have encountered the work as a means of introducing them to history, poetry, and the moral values of courage, self-sacrifice, and patriotism that Macaulay extolled.

Late 6th century B.C. A plain before Rome. Enter LARS PORSENA, MAMILIUS, SEXTUS, their various VASSALS and RETAINERS, the ENTIRE TUSCAN ARMY and DR and SCOTT EVIL] Just as fun as the poems themselves, though, are the essays that precede them, in which Macaulay discusses the characteristics of the Roman ballad tradition—which is of course his own fabrication—in a way that explains (and excuses) many features of his poems, including the occasional anachronism.

The Prophecy of Capys - Romulus and Remus return triumphant to the home of their grandfather Capys. When they arrive, Capys - blind and well advanced in years - is seized by a prophetic frenzy: Capys declaims a series of portents describing the future battles and victories destined as the lot of Romulus' descendants. Their leader was false Sextus, / That wrought the deed of shame: / With restless pace and haggard face / To his last field he came. / Men said he saw strange visions / Which none beside might see; / And that strange sounds were in his ears / Which none might hear but he. / A woman fair and stately, / But pale as are the dead, / Oft through the watches of the night / Sat spinning by his bed. / And as she plied the distaff, / In a sweet voice and low, / She sang of great old houses, / And fights fought long ago. / So spun she, and so sang she, / Until the east was gray. / Then pointed to her bleeding breast, / And shrieked, and fled away." In Darkest Hour, Winston Churchill recites the following verses from "Horatius" (one of the Lays of Ancient Rome) to his fellow passengers in the London Underground: “Then out spake brave Horatius,The Roman ballads are preceded by brief introductions, discussing the legends from a scholarly perspective. Macaulay explains that his intention was to write poems resembling those that might have been sung in ancient times.The Lays were first published by Longman in 1842, at the beginning of the Victorian Era. They became immensely popular, and were a regular subject of recitation, then a common pastime. The Lays were standard reading in British public schools for more than a century. Here follows what he says about this legend: The plan occurred to me in the jungle at the foot of the Neilgherry hills; and most of the verses were made during a dreary sojourn at Ootacamund and a disagreeable voyage in the Bay of Bengal. [1]

Informs as it fascinates, Macaulay's Lays is altogether my favorite work of poetry. The words are evocative like no other poet I've read - Macauley manages to spin together action, suspense, gore, horror, and melodrama. Horatius at the Bridge is the highlight of the whole book, although the others are enjoyable too (Capys the least of the bunch): Regillus takes Horatius's Iliadic tone and expands it into a larger epic, Virginia brings to mind a short stage melodrama, and Capys is mostly a historical footnote to bring everything together. My two favorite stanzas (How can a man choose?!) are from Horatius and Regillus, respectively: Macaulay, Lays of Ancient Rome, William J. and John C. Rolfe, eds., Harper and Brothers, New York (1888). Believe it or not the epigram “Rome was not built in a day”, meaning that some things cannot be done at once, but require time and patience, was not coined by Romans. As a matter of fact it first appeared in England in John Heywood’s “A Dialogue Containing the Number in Effect of All the Proverbes in the English Tongue” (1546). It was also used in “Don Quixote” (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes. Nowadays modern Romans usually do as they like, and do not expect others do as they do. That what is called the history of the Kings and early Consuls of Rome is to a great extent fabulous, few scholars have, since the time of Beaufort, ventured to deny. It is certain that, more than three hundred and sixty years after the date ordinarily assigned for the foundation of the city, the public records were, with scarcely an exception, destroyed by the Gauls. It is certain that the oldest annals of the commonwealth were compiled more than a century and a half after this destruction of the records. He will admit that the most important parts of the narrative have some foundation in truth. But he will distrust almost all the details, not only because they seldom rest on any solid evidence, but also because he will constantly detect in them, even when they are within the limits of physical possibility, that peculiar character, more easily understood than defined, which distinguishes the creations of the imagination from the realities of the world in which we live.

The Prophecy of Capys

Langworth, Richard M. (2009). "End of Glory: "Into the Storm" ". winstonchurchill.org. The International Churchill Society . Retrieved 16 July 2021. One of my favorite features of ancient poetry is its catalogs: the lists of gods, warriors or cities, each labeled with the appropriate epithet or characteristic. Macaulay excels at this sort of poetry. Here is his list of the Latin League towns and territories from “The Battle of Lake Regillus” (including the Rex Nemorensa of Aricia, memorialized by James Frazer in The Golden Bough): From every warlike city Richard Corliss (19 April 2013). "Tom Cruise in Oblivion: Drones and Clones on Planet Earth". Time . Retrieved 31 August 2013. Was I moved by this? Hard to tell, for I was already weeping. I had begun to weep the moment Churchill began his recitation, for I remembered how my Aunt Alice--a contemporary of Sir Winston's--had often recited the very same passage to me. She was of Irish heritage, daughter of an immigrant from England, and had memorized these verses in a Cincinnati grade school during the final years of the First World War. (Aunt Alice also possessed a foot-high iron statue, of a Roman warrior with upraised sword, which she called "Horatius" and used as a door stop. He is still in service to our family, having guarded my bookshelves for most of the last twenty years.) Under these circumstances a wise man will look with great suspicion on the legend which has come down to us. He will perhaps be inclined to regard the princes who are said to have founded the civil and religious institutions of Rome, the sons of Mars, and the husband of Egeria, as mere mythological personages, of the same class with Perseus and Ixion. As he draws nearer to the confines of authentic history, he will become less and less hard of belief.

The Lays of Ancient Rome comprise four narrative poems comprised by Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay: recalling popular episodes from Roman historical-legends that were strongly moral in tone: exemplifying Roman virtue against Latine perfidy. Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay PC was an English poet, historian and Whig politician. He wrote extensively as an essayist and reviewer, and on British history. He also held political office as Secretary at War between 1839 and 1841 and Paymaster-General between 1846 and 1848. Lays of Ancient Rome is an 1842 collection of narrative poems, or lays, by Thomas Babington Macaulay. Four of these recount heroic episodes from early Roman history with strong dramatic and tragic themes, giving the collection its name. Macaulay also included two poems inspired by recent history: Ivry (1824) and The Armada (1832). As a teenager, Winston Churchill won a Harrow School award for memorising and declaiming all 1,200 lines [i] of Macaulay's text. [10] In the films Into the Storm (2009) [11] and Darkest Hour (2017), he is depicted reciting Horatius' speech while Prime Minister during the Second World War. [12] The poems themselves are fun, in an old-fashioned bumptious way. They aren’t first-rate poetry, but they are first-rate second-rate poetry, and that’s good enough for me. (“The Raven,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” and “The Highwayman” are all excellent examples of my idea of first-rate second-rate verse.)Macaulay was in his thirties serving as "the legal member" of the Governor-General’s Supreme Council for India. While ministering to the fledgling empire of the British, Macaulay reflected upon the origin of the Roman; he read closely the first five books of Livy, which are filled with the myths and legends preserved from Rome’s earliest days. Scholars of Macaulay’s time believed the theory—since rejected—that Livy based his history on ballads now lost—works of the early empire which praised the city’s ancient origins—and it was reflecting upon these lost ballads that sparked Macaulay’s creativity. What would these old ballads have looked like? How would they have treated their already mythic material? Would their writers’ view of the present have helped them organize the myths of the past? You can see why the Victorians loved these verses by Macaulay, celebrating as they do the very Victorian virtues of Courage and Patriotism. I myself was swept up in some of Macaulay’s Lays, in particular I was moved by the poem “Horatius” whose famous lines pop up in films from time to time (such as Tom Cruise’s “Oblivion” and, more recently, the Churchill biopic “Darkest Hour.”): The same story of Romulus and Remus is just a story which says that they founded on this day Rome. Read what a famous English historian wrote in his “Lays of Ancient Rome”, a collection of narrative poems, or lays: Thomas Babington Macaulay. Four of these recount heroic episodes from early Roman history with strong dramatic and tragic themes, giving the collection its name. The Lays were composed by Macaulay in his thirties, during his spare time while he was the "legal member" of the Governor-General of India's Supreme Council from 1834 to 1838.