The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
When Brennus the Gaul broke through the gates of Rome, Marcus Furius Camillus was far away in exile.
After Marcus Furius Camillus successfully besieged the Etruscan cities of Veii in 396 BC and Falerii a year later, he returned to Rome in grand style, expecting popular adoration. But he overdid the spectacle, and rivals used the grumbling to contrive his banishment for corruption. He settled in Ardea on the coast, and he was still there in 390 BC when he learnt that Rome was under imminent threat.
Marcus Furius Camillus knew he must make the Falisci submit to Rome, but the method one man proposed was more than he could stomach.
In 396 BC, Marcus Furius Camillus captured Veii, the southernmost city of Etruria and only nine miles north of Rome. The following year he captured Falerii, chief city of the Falisci (also in Tuscany) after a siege that had lasted ten years. The Falisci did not take kindly to Roman rule, and Camillus was tasked with securing their obedience — but he would not do it at just any price.
Marullus was disgusted at the way that the fickle people of Rome turned so easily from one hero to another.
In 60 BC, three rivals for control of the Roman Republic, Pompey, Crassus and Caesar, formed the Triumvirate, an uneasy alliance. Crassus died in 53 out in Syria. Caesar defeated Pompey in Greece in 48, and Pompey’s sons in Spain in 45. He returned home to popular adoration, and in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar Marullus was disgusted by this celebration of victory for Roman over Roman.
Following a succesful hunting partnership, the Lion explains how the spoils are to be divided.
Aesop’s Fable of the Lion and the Wild Ass is the origin of the phrase ‘the lion’s share’, meaning the largest portion by far. The version below comes from Sir Roger L’Estrange’s ground-breaking collection of 1669, just as he wrote it. “People should have a care” he advised “how they Engage themselves in Partnerships with Men that are too Mighty for them, whether it be in Mony, Pleasure, or Bus’ness.”
The English ‘Cato’ cautioned that sabre-rattling sanctions and other forms of coercion are never in the country’s economic interest.
The wisdom in the 1720s was that the Government and its wealthy partners should use their superior financial and military resources to shape global trade in the British interest; so they bribed, bullied and bombarded foreign lands and peoples into working for us instead of themselves. Wars spread, debts mounted, and ‘Cato’ wondered what happened to sane men when they joined the Cabinet.
Roman statesman Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus was thrust out the City for his hardline politics, but he did not stay away for long.
The story of Gnaeus Marcius Corolianus tells of a Roman nobleman forced to choose between his own life and the wishes of his family. How much of it is legend remains a matter of debate, though historians seem satisfied that the background (it is set in the late 490s BC) is plausible enough. At any rate, William Shakespeare found the tale sufficiently appealing to turn it into a play, in about 1607-8.