The History of Rome, Book V eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 917 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book V.

The History of Rome, Book V eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 917 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book V.

With the mimus of the classical Greek period—­prose dialogues, in which -genre- pictures, particularly of a rural kind, were presented—­the Roman mimus had no especial relation.

10.  With the possession of this sum, which constituted the qualification for the first voting-class and subjected the inheritance to the Voconian law, the boundary line was crossed which separated the men of slender means (-tenuiores-) from respectable people.  Therefore the poor client of Catullus (xxiii. 26) beseeches the gods to help him to this fortune.

11.  In the “Descensus ad Inferos” of Laberius all sorts of people come forward, who have seen wonders and signs; to one there appeared a husband with two wives, whereupon a neighbour is of opinion that this is still worse than the vision, recently seen by a soothsayer in a dream, of six aediles.  Caesar forsooth desired—­ according to the talk of the time—­to introduce polygamy in Rome (Suetonius, Caes. 82) and he nominated in reality six aediles instead of four.  One sees from this that aberius understood how to exercise the fool’s privilege and Caesar how to permit the fool’s freedom.

12.  V. VIII.  Attempts of the Regents to Check It

13.  V. XI.  The Poor

14.  IV.  XIII.  Dramatic Arrangements

15.  He obtained from the state for every day on which he acted 1000 -denarii- (40 pounds) and besides this the pay for his company.  In later years he declined the honorarium for himself.

16.  Such an individual apparent exception as Panchaea the land of incense (ii. 417) is to be explained from the circumstance that this had passed from the romance of the Travels of Euhemerus already perhaps into the poetry of Ennius, at any rate into the poems of Lucius Manlius (iv. 242; Plin.  H. N. x. a, 4) and thence was well known to the public for which Lucretius wrote.

17.  III.  XIV.  Moral Effect of Tragedy

18.  This naively appears in the descriptions of war, in which the seastorms that destroy armies, and the hosts of elephants that trample down those who are on their own side—­pictures, that is, from the Punic wars—­appear as if they belong to the immediate present.  Comp. ii. 41; v. 1226, 1303, 1339.

19.  “No doubt,” says Cicero (Tusc. iii. 19, 45) in reference to Ennius, “the glorious poet is despised by our reciters of Euphorion.”  “I have safely arrived,” he writes to Atticus (vii. 2 init.), “as a most favourable north wind blew for us across from Epirus.  This spondaic line you may, if you choose, sell to one of the new-fashioned poets as your own” (-ita belle nobis flavit ab Epiro lenissumus Onchesmites.  Hunc- —­spondeiazonta—­ -si cui voles —­ton neoteron—­ pro tuo vendito-).

20.  V. VIII.  Literature of the Opposition

21.  “For me when a boy,” he somewhere says, “there sufficed a single rough coat and a single under-garment, shoes without stockings, a horse without a saddle; I had no daily warm bath, and but seldom a river-bath.”  On account of his personal valour he obtained in the Piratic war, where he commanded a division of the fleet, the naval crown.

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The History of Rome, Book V from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.