The History of Rome, Book I eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 382 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book I.

The History of Rome, Book I eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 382 pages of information about The History of Rome, Book I.

10.  The employment of the lyre in ritual is attested by Cicero de Orat. iii. 51, 197; Tusc. iv. 2, 4; Dionysius, vii. 72; Appian, Pun. 66; and the inscription in Orelli, 2448, comp. 1803.  It was likewise used at the -neniae- (Varro ap.  Nonium, v. -nenia-and -praeficae-).  But playing on the lyre remained none the less unbecoming (Scipio ap.  Macrob.  Sat. ii. 10, et al.).  The prohibition of music in 639 exempted only the “Latin player on the pipe along with the singer,” not the player on the lyre, and the guests at meals sang only to the pipe (Cato in Cic.  Tusc. i. 2, 3; iv. 2, 3; Varro ap.  Nonium, v. -assa voce-; Horace, Carm. iv. 15, 30).  Quintilian, who asserts the reverse (Inst. i. 10, 20), has inaccurately transferred to private banquets what Cicero (de Orat. iii. 51) states in reference to the feasts of the gods.

11.  The city festival can have only lasted at first for a single day, for in the sixth century it still consisted of four days of scenic and one day of Circensian sports (Ritschl, Parerga, i. 313) and it is well known that the scenic amusements were only a subsequent addition.  That in each kind of contest there was originally only one competition, follows from Livy, xliv. 9; the running of five-and-twenty pairs of chariots in succession on one day was a subsequent innovation (Varro ap.  Serv.  Georg. iii. 18).  That only two chariots—­and likewise beyond doubt only two horsemen and two wrestlers—­strove for the prize, may be inferred from the circumstance, that at all periods in the Roman chariot-races only as many chariots competed as there were so-called factions; and of these there were originally only two, the white and the red.  The horsemanship-competition of patrician youths which belonged to the Circensian games, the so-called Troia, was, as is well known, revived by Caesar; beyond doubt it was connected with the cavalcade of the boy-militia, which Dionysius mentions (vii. 72).

12.  I. VII.  Servian Wall

13.  I. VI.  Time and Occasion of the Reform

14.  I. II.  Religion

15. -Vates- probably denoted in the first instance the “leader of the singing” (for so the -vates- of the Salii must be understood) and thereafter in its older usage approximated to the Greek —­propheiteis—­; it was a word be longing to religious ritual, and even when subsequently used of the poet, always retained the accessory idea of a divinely-inspired singer—­the priest of the Muses.

16.  We shall show in due time that the Atellanae and Fescenninae belonged not to Campanian and Etruscan, but to Latin art.

17.  Literally “word-crisping,” in allusion to the -calamistri Maecenatis-.

18.  I. III.  Alba

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