Book Review: Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome
“Thine, Roman, is the pilum;
Roman, the sword is thine,
The even trench, the bristling mound,
The legion’s ordered line;
And thine the wheels of triumph
Which with their laureled train
Move slowly up the shouting streets
To Jove’s eternal fane.”
Fame and popularity are fleeting things, more Ozymandian even than great empires. A book leaving few traces save the page itself—a perishable thing, and unassuming—, time tends to be brutal towards the author of the moment: One day, he is at the top of his game, copies being torn off the shelves, lines being recited by tastemakers and politicians alike; the next day, we do not even remember that he used to be read. Such has largely been the fate of Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), whose verses at one time were read and recited everywhere from the British parliament to the fields of the American Civil War—bestsellers in an age before bestsellers, almost at the level of his contemporary, Sir Walter Scott, who history and memory have been moderately kinder to. The Lays of Ancient Rome are a quintessential work of their times, whose sinking from memory is not, perhaps surprising. That is not, however, to say that it is not sad. It is difficult to explain the reasons why Macaulay should have been forgotten without indicting us quite as much as the poet himself.
What, then, are the actual contents of Macaulay’s Lays? They are, in short, an exercise in artistic reconstruction, an attempt to write up a string of old Latin folk ballads (in English) about the early days of Rome, as they might have sounded, had any survived from this period. If this sounds perhaps somewhat dry, I should hasten to make clear that Macaulay’s Lays are anything but: They are, in fact, extremely martial, vigorous, and violent verging at times on the macabre. The Lays of Ancient Rome were, as noted, veritable bestsellers in their day, read by commoners and soldiers alike, including far from the shores of Britain, and reading them it is not difficult to see why. Dry, academic philological exercises they are not.
“Now on each side the leaders
Gave signal for the charge;
And on each side the footmen
Strode on with lance and targe;
And on each side the horsemen
Struck deep their spurs in gore,
And front to front the armies
Met with a mighty roar;
And under that great battle
The earth with blood was red;
And like the Pomptine fog at morn
The dust hung overhead;
And louder still and louder
Rose from the darkened field
The braying of the war horns,
The clang of sword and shield,
The rush of squadrons sweeping
Like whirlwinds o’er the plain,
The shouting of the slayers,
And screeching of the slain.”
As Macaulay writes in his introduction, “[t]he early history of Rome is indeed far more poetical than anything else in Latin literature…” The early history of Rome, which we meet, half-shadowed, through the likes of Livy and Virgil, is indeed more archetypal and fairy-tale than the later epochs—unsurprisingly, perhaps. From the story of Romulus and Remus, half Mosaic castaway narrative, half lupine Kóryos, to the battles of Rome and Etruria, the banishment of the wicked kings, and the last fading embers of old Troy. Macaulay’s Lays cover a number of events: The Prophecy of Capys concerns the aftermath of the slaying of King Amulius of Alba Longa, when the blind seer Capys delivers to Romulus and Remus a prophecy of Rome’s future greatness; Virginia covers a tragic narrative from a dark period of the city’s history, where a father kills his daughter to avoid her being captured and violated by corrupt rulers, the aftermath of which sees the toppling of said regime. The Battle of Lake Regillus is a triumphant account of Rome’s final victory against the forces of Latium and Etruria, in their attempt to reinstate the exiled Tarquin monarchs, with the Roman forces unexpectedly bolstered by the intervention of the divine twins Castor and Pollux. Most famous of the Lays, however, is undoubtedly the Horatius, which concerns the siege of Rome some years before Lake Regillus, when the heroic Horatius, alongside bold Herminius and Spurius Lartius, held the Tiber bridge from the Etruscan forces until the Romans could finish cutting it, thus saving the city from invasion.
“Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
”To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his Gods...
Hew down the bridge, Sir Consul,
With all the speed ye may;
I, with two more to help me,
Will hold the foe in play.
In yon strait path a thousand
May well be stopped by three.
Now who will stand on either hand,
And keep the bridge with me?”
The Battle of Lake Regillus, illustrated by John Reinhard Weguelin for the 1880 edition of the Lays
It is all very ‘dulce et decorum…’ (fittingly, considering the name of that poet). Macaulay’s verse is not the most extravagantly formed, nor, as a rule, likely to inspire great fervour for the sheer beauty of language. It is blunt, matter-of-factly, and metrically uncomplicated: Verse as vehicle for narrative, not narrative as pretext for versification. All the same, Macaulay knows how to strike an effective line, and often sets up sweeping vistas that culminate in a forceful, catching rhyme.
The Lays had their share of literary critics at the time, and were viewed somewhat askance by those with more ‘refined’ poetical palettes. Perhaps this is a testament to how low our standards have sunken in these latter days, that even the subpar verse of previous ages registers as elevated to our ears—perhaps. Or, perhaps it merely shows that snobbery has ever been part of the human experience. I cannot say, but at any rate I enjoyed Macaulay’s bracing verse, which may reflect well or poorly on me. It seems to me that the measure of quality is not merely sophistication in some absolute sense, but also fittedness of form to function: Macaulay’s verse is going for the style of a popular lay or ballad, and by that metric, his metre seems quite as good to me as the genuine folk epic.
What is very striking about the Lays is the expectation they have of their readership, both in the great familiarity with, and interest in, the classical world that they clearly presuppose, and the evident willingness to be bombarded by unfamiliar names and places. The following snippet is not unrepresentative:
“Aricia, Cora, Norba,
Velitræ, with the might,
Of setia and of Tusculum, were marshaled on the right.
The leader was Mamilius,
Prince of the Latian name;
Upon his head a helmet
Of red gold shone like flame”
Names, of course, need not be known beforehand to be enticing: The point of Macaulay’s long intonations, veritable Catalogues of Ships, is not merely to test the classical learning of his reader, but to entice him with the almost liturgical drone of exotic names and titles. When Macaulay speaks of the bristling, dusky forests of “Byrsa’s thousand masts,” or the place where “Atlas flings his shadow far o’er the western foam,” the reader need not possess any clear mental geography to be whisked away to far-off lands. Nevertheless, it is evident that Macaulay does expect a far greater familiarity with Virgil and Livy than would any modern author today, and it is worth re-iterating that this is a work which was torn off the shelves by the general public, and for which a great deal of the intended readership was in particular school-age boys. Macaulay had higher expectations of the untutored everyman than most classics departments today have of their credentialed graduates.
This, combined with the exceedingly martial, patriotic tone of the work makes it little surprise that its widespread popularity has not endured. Macaulay wrote for the public, but it was the public of another age and another temperament. Nevertheless, for those who are not put off by the litanies of Latin and Etruscan names, or the references to grinding dust and bloody blows, the Lays of Ancient Rome are well worth retrieving from the dusty shelf of literary history.
“Ye good men of the Commons, with loving hearts and true,
Who stand by the bold Tribunes that still have stood by you,
Come, make a circle round me, and mark my tale with care,
A tale of what once Rome hath borne, of what Rome yet may bear.”