Adam Newey Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. In the slimmest novel to grace a Booker shortlist, the spiritual recovery of trench veteran Tom Birkin is charted as he restores a medieval wall-painting in a rural church. Much of the novel's potency is rooted in what isn't said, by Carr and his characters alike, including the very thing that returns Birkin to the land of the living: Both Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth made fresh-faced debuts in the film, which does justice to the novel's slow pace.
Rosalind Porter Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Jim Burden looks back, slightly mournfully, on his childhood friendship growing up in harsh prairie town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, with the bold, beautiful Bohemian girl, "Tony" Shimerda, whose resilience and strength symbolises the pioneer spirit, who has haunted him ever since. The friends are reunited many years later, when both are married — he unhappily and she the mother of 10 children.
Cather's story of unconsummated love in the American wilderness is among her best. Marian Forrester is a beautiful woman who delights her husband, her lover, and young Niel Herbert, the narrator of this enchanting tale. Cather was the great, elegiac chronicler of the prairies and small towns of the old American west, captured by her just as the coming of railroads changed it forever.
The radiance and charm of the bewitching Marian sheds light on everyone she loves and betrays, her fate as troubling and inevitable as the passing of time, and the passing of love. Short, exquisite, this is Willa Cather's most perfect novel. Colette's debut was published under the pseudonym of her husband, Willy, who is believed to have locked her in a room until she produced the books.
Colette herself married three times, was rumoured to have had lesbian relationships at the Moulin Rouge and was involved with the Italian writer Gabriele D'Annunzio; she was also thought to have had an affair with her stepson. Stephen Frears adapted it for the screen in in a film starring Michelle Pfeiffer as the courtesan and Rupert Friend as her lover.
One of Conrad's sea-dog narrators pieces together the story of Axel Heyst, benign hermit and amateur philosopher, who isolates himself from humanity on an island in the East Indies. Heyst chivalrously rescues Lena, a musician, from the female orchestra that entertains the hard-drinking European men of Sumatran trading outposts. The lovers attract the attentions of a rapacious gang, who descend on them, searching for non-existent booty. Their amorous seclusion ensures them a tragic end. John Mullan Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Often called the first French novel, this historical fiction takes us to the world of 16th-century courtly romance.
It is only when she meets Duc de Nemours that she falls in love for the first time. The love triangle raises questions of passion, duty and morality. The novel was published anonymously and has remained popular ever since. But this is unlike anything else she wrote. Based partly on her own childhood, it follows three contemporary children: Their parents are artists in the grandest tradition, and bring up their kids accordingly — rich food, late nights, sporadic attention.
1. Life and Works
Maria becomes an actress, Niall a songwriter, Celia a would-be illustrator. All three are spoilt and selfish in their different ways. It adds up to a savage, bittersweet portrait of artistic temperament at its worst. Carrie O'Grady Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop.
Alfred Hitchcock's classily creepy film version starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine sealed its place in the public imagination — although Hollywood, predictably, was unable to sanction the morally ambiguous happy ending of the original. The nameless narrator looks back at her adolescence in French-colonial Vietnam when, as a year-old, she had a passionate affair with a considerably older Chinese man.
The story is thought to be semi-autobiographical. Duras, who is also a film-maker, uses cinematic techniques such as flashback and repetition. The book won the Prix Goncourt and s old , copies in France. The film by Jean-Jacques Annaud was also a success. Eliot's first full-length novel, and the work which made her pseudonymous name as Victorian fiction's leading novelist of ideas.
Set at the turn of the 19th century, in "Hayslope" during the Methodist revival, the story concerns Adam, a stern carpenter who is engaged to the pretty but flighty milkmaid, Hetty Sorrel. Hetty is seduced by the local squire, Arthur. He abandons her; she — pursuing him — kills their baby. She is sentenced to hang, but reprieved by Arthur's last-minute intervention. With this novel Eliot raised Victorian fiction to a new level of intellectual and moral seriousness. Eliot's last massive novel.
Gwendolen Harleth "a spoiled child" marries the wealthy but selfish Henleigh Grandcourt. He treats her sadistically. Gwendolen's path crosses that of Daniel Deronda, a young aristocrat of mysterious origins even to himself. The intertwining narrative chronicles Daniel's search for his roots, and Gwendolen's increasingly wretched plight. Daniel befriends Mordecai Lapidoth with whose sister, Mirah, he falls in love and discovers that he is Jewish. In Genoa, Grandcourt drowns, as a paralysed Gwendolen watches from the deck of his yacht.
The novel ends with Daniel and Mirah leaving for the Middle East. Recent appreciation of the novel has tended to value Eliot's unusually sensitive investigation of Judaism. Eliot's most autobiographical work of fiction, and one of the great bildungsromane of its time, along with David Copperfield and Thackeray's Pendennis. Maggie and Tom are children of the mill-owner, Edward Tulliver. The passionate Maggie is contrasted with her genteel cousin, Lucy.
Tom is less clever than his sister, but moralistic. Old Tulliver is ruined by local lawyer, Wakem. Maggie's love affair with the disabled Philip Wakem is prohibited by a vengeful Tom, who devotes himself to recovering the family mill. Maggie devotes herself to self-control.
All is lost when brother and sister are drowned by a catastrophic flood which sweeps past the mill, but "in death they were not divided". One by one, in an unnamed American suburb, five teenage sisters kill themselves. It doesn't sound much like a love story. But The Virgin Suicides is narrated in the first-person plural, ingeniously by the boys who looked on at the beautiful Lisbon sisters with awe and yearning — boys like Chase Buell, Woody Clabault, Vince Fusilli, Parkie Denton and Tim Winer, "the brain".
Years later, they piece together memories of their adolescence: When the boys follow neighbourhood heart-throb Trip Fontaine to pick up the Lisbon girls for the homecoming dance, the whole world seems waiting for them. William Fiennes Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. There is a love affair at the centre of this novel, between rich, charismatic socialite Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.
You might even call it romantic, for Gatsby appears to have everything he wants except Daisy, who is now married to another man. Yet you never directly know about their relationship. The doomed attachment is seen entirely through the eyes of the novel's narrator, Nick Carraway. He has the lovers performing a drama that he is desperate to enrich with soulfulness.
The romance and the final tragedy are the more haunting for being vicariously experienced. JM Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. When actress Rosemary Hoyt arrives on the French riviera, she's seduced by the dash and verve of a group of American expats gathered around successful psychiatrist Dick Diver and his beautiful patient-turned-wife, Nicole. Outwardly ideal, their marriage drawn in part from Fitzgerald's own is in fact fatally fl awed.
As Rosemary is drawn deeper into their lives, she watches glamour give way to dissipation; Dick's drinking escalates and his behaviour deteriorates, leading ultimately to his personal and professional disintegration. Almost a decade in the making, Fitzgerald's elegiac romance is a narrative of failure: Sarah Crown Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Few modern novels have been so acclaimed by critics and fellow novelists as The Blue Flower. Set in s provincial Saxony, it is a parable of talent and desire the blue flower a Romantic symbol of love and the unattainable , told through the story of the young German poet and philosopher Novalis, known to his family as Fritz.
Poor Fritz falls hopelessly in love with year-old Sophie von Kuhn, unremarkable in looks and certainly no match for him in brains, who dies a couple of years later from tuberculosis.
Fitzgerald's genius was to bring a remote period alive through an accumulation of domestic details with an extraordinary economy of words. Hailed as her final masterpiece, the novel is as brief, luminous and intellectually charged as the life of its young hero. Emma Bovary, the wife of a kindly but dull country doctor, yearns for a life of luxury and romance that she has read about in popular novels. When a landowning libertine takes a fancy to her, she begins an affair which ends when he abandons her on the eve of their elopement.
No sooner has she recovered than she takes up with a young lawyer with whom she has weekly trysts in a hotel room. As their passion cools, her extravagance increases, and she is lured into a credit trap from which only suicide can release her. Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity when the book was first serialised, and it has been a bestseller ever since, becoming arguably the most famous realist novel.
Claire Armistead Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Nobody gets what they want and nothing is quite what it seems in this masterwork of shifting perceptions, infidelities and immorality. Ford Madox Ford's first title for his greatest novel, begun on his 40th birthday, was The Saddest Story. The Good Soldier is Edward Asburnham, the perfect English gentleman in every way — except for his fatal philandering. Recalled in rambling fashion by the emotionally desiccated Dowell the ultimate unreliable narrator , this is the story of a year friendship between two couples living in moneyed leisure in Europe, as a cure for the heart conditions of two of the spouses.
These "bad hearts" are exposed for what they really are when it is revealed that the invalids have been embroiled in an affair for many years. Suicide, madness and misery ensue. Since its publication in , writers have outdone each other in heaping superlatives on this slim, exquisite book: Forster's acidic satire on the Edwardian travelling English would have remained among his lesser works certainly compared to the later, more substantial statements that were Howards End and A Passage to India were it not for the smart decision by the period-fi lm team Merchant Ivory to use it as the material for their affectionate mids adaptation, thereby setting the template for corset rom-coms ever since.
The admittedly slight social concerns are ballasted by a genuinely affecting against-the-odds love match between piano-playing Lucy Honeychurch and wide-eyed socialist George Emerson. Andrew Pulver Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. In John Fowles opened up the Victorian realist novel, with its driving marriage plot, to the instability of the existentialist age. Charles Smithson is a gentleman of independent means engaged to the conventional Ernestina while secretly falling in love with the intriguing Sarah Woodruff, a fallen woman who has been betrayed by the French lieutenant of the title.
Set mainly on the Jurassic undercliff at Lyme Regis, the novel plays with the idea that the Victorian bourgeoisie — and the kind of novel that represents it — is on the brink of extinction. The book's celebrated double ending meant that for a long time it was considered unfilmable, until Harold Pinter's screenplay of proved this to be magnificently untrue.
KH Buy this book at the Guardian bookshop. Set on the desolate Essex marshes, this haunting novella of the friendship between the "mis-shapen and grotesque" reclusive artist, Philip Rhayader, and the "young, primitive inarticulate" yet beautiful Fritha, after she brings him a wounded snow goose to heal, made Gallico's name and became a world wide bestseller.
Accompanied only by the snow goose, Philip rescues countless men from the shores of Dunkirk in his little boat, but when the bird returns alone, the now grown-up Fritha knows she will never see the hunchback again. Ruth Hilton, an orphaned seamstress, is seduced and then abandoned by Henry Bellingham, a young squire.
Rescued by a dissenting minister, Mr Benson, and his sister, and taken to live with them in his northern English parish, she passes as a widow and slowly builds a life of quiet respectability for herself and her son. His leisure hours were employed in the construction of philosophical toys, such as sun-dials, water-clocks, etc. In order to get rid of Theodoric, Zeno gave him permission to invade Italy, and expelled the usurper Odoacer from the country. Theodoric entered Italy in , defeated Odoacer in three great battles, and finally became master of Italy, ruling it for 33 years till his death in His long reign was prosperous and beneficent.
He was a patron of literature, and among his ministers were Cassiodorus and Boethius, the two last writers who can claim a place in the literature of ancient Rome. There is also much history connected with the place. Attila, king of the Goths, burned and destroyed the city. Here also Alboin Alboninus [Alboin, king of the Lombards and barbarian conqueror of northern Italy, succeeded his father Audoin about The Lombards at that time were engaged in constant war with the Gepidae. Alboin finally destroyed them, slew their king Cunimund in battle, and married his daughter Rosamund.
On April 1, he assembled his people with a great number of allies to cross the Alps and form a new settlement in Italy—a migration rather than an invasion. The Roman defenses were overrun and Lombard rule was established in northern Italy. But Alboin was murdered at the instigation of his wife whom he insulted by making her drink wine from her father's skull. And here the Emperor Rudolphus defeated the Emperor Berengarius, and killed him.
Here also the noble House of La Scala was in power, and ruled illustriously for seventy years. To this family belonged two great scholars, Julius Caesar Scaliger to , and Joseph Justus Scaliger to , the greatest scholar of his day. Here, as in other noted cities, flourished distinguished men. Zeno was the first bishop of Verona. He wrote much in interpretation of the Old and the New Testaments. Zeno, or Zenone, the eighth bishop of Verona, was famous for his learning and for the piety of his life.
His writings have come down to the present day, and besides their doctrine and devotion, also have some literary merit. He died about or He inherited considerable property from his father, who was the friend of Julius Caesar. He adorned all he touched, and his shorter poems are characterized by original invention and felicity of expression. In fact, Catullus is now considered one of the greatest of all Roman poets. He was born at Verona, and studied Greek at Constantinople, where for five years he was the pupil of Manuel Chrysolaras. In he became professor of Greek at Ferrara, where he died in His principal works are translations of Strabo and of some of the Lives of Plutarch, a compendium of the Greek grammar of Chrysolaras, and a series of commentaries on Persius, Juvenal, Martial, and on some of the writings of Aristotle and Cicero.
Verona is an important town in what was anciently Gallia Cisalpina, on the river Athesis, now called the Adige. It belonged to the Cenomani, a Gaulish tribe, whose chief town was Brixia. It became a Latin colony in 89 BCE. Its territory stretched as far as Hostilia on the Padus Po , thirty miles to the south. It lay on the road between Mediolanum and Aquileia, while here diverged to the north the roads over the Brenner. It was the birthplace of the poet Catullus. In 69 CE, it became the headquarters of the legions which were siding with Vespasian.
It was defended by a river along two-thirds of its circumference. The existing remains of walls and gates date back to the year The emperor Constantine, while advancing toward Rome from Gaul, besieged and took Verona ; it was here too that Odoacer was defeated in by Theodoric the Goth, known to the German writers as Dietrich von Bern, after whom the town was named Dietrich Bern, to distinguish it from Berne in Switzerland.
He built a castle at Verona, and frequently resided there. He enlarged the fortified area by constructing a wall and ditch now called Adigetto , to the southwest of the amphitheatre, and also built baths and restored aqueducts, which had long been out of use. In the Middle Ages Verona gradually grew in size and importance.
Alboin, the Lombard king, captured it in , and it was one of the chief residences of the Lombards and later of the Frankish monarchs. It rose to importance under the rule of the Della Scala family. The first prominent member of this family and founder of his dynasty was Mastino I, della Scala, who ruled over the city from till his death in Verona had previously fallen under Ezzelino da Romano Alberto della Scala was succeeded by his eldest son Bartholomew, who was confirmed as ruler of Verona by popular vote, and died in It was at this time that Romeo and Juliet are said to have lived.
Alboino, the second son, succeeded his brother, and died in , when the youngest son of Alberto, Can Grande, who since had been joint-lord of Verona with his brother, succeeded to the undivided power. Can Grande was the best and most illustrious of his line, and is specially famous as the hospitable patron of Dante. The dynasty lasted for rather more than a century.
Soon after his death the city fell by treacherous means into the hands of Francesco II, di Carrara, lord of Padua. In Verona, together with Padua, was finally conquered by Venice, and remained subject to the Venetians until the overthrow of the Republic by Napoleon in , who ceded it to Austria in the same year with the rest of Venetia. The Roman remains of Verona surpass those of any other city in northern Italy.
The most conspicuous of them is the great amphitheatre, which closely resembled the Colosseum in Rome. Its axes measured and feet. It was partly thrown down by an earthquake in , and was subsequently used to supply building materials. The interior, with seats for about 25, people, has been restored. Cyrus the first and mightiest king of the Persians, in this year, being the 30th of the Captivity of the Jews, and the 55th Olympiad, founded the kingdom and empire of Persia; and he reigned 30 years.
He was a grandson of Astyages, king of the Medes by his daughter Mandane. After subjugating many of the cities that had been antagonistic to him, he made war against Belshazzar, king of Chaldea and Babylonia, and defeated him; and soon afterwards he destroyed Babylon. Cyrus then marched against Croesus, the Lydian king, who had given aid to the Babylonians, defeated him, and deprived him of all his wealth of empire, reducing him to poverty. After he had subjugated Asia, that is, almost all the lands to the East, he attacked the Scythians, who were then under the leadership of Queen Tomyris Tamiris.
In the first engagement he defeated and killed her son and his entire army. When Tomyris learned of the death of her only son and the defeat of her people, she did not cry as women in general do, but assembled and encamped the remainder of her people in a manner to give the impression that she had no faith in the mountains, and luring Cyrus into the narrow passes of the high mountains, killed him and his force of two thousand, not a man escaping.
She had a search made for the corpse of Cyrus, and when found, had his head struck off and submerged in a vat which she had prepared for the purpose, filled with the blood of his own people, as a fitting grave for the haughty king. Cyrus, take the blood for which you have always thirsted! But his body was taken to the city of Pasargadae and buried in a park. The following epitaph was placed upon the grave: Cyrus I was the founder of the Persian Empire. The account of Herodotus best preserves the Persian legends and romances interwoven in the history of his life.
Cyrus was the son of Cambyses, a noble Persian, and of Mandane, daughter of the Median king Astyages. In consequence of a dream, which seemed to portend that his grandson should become the master of Asia, Astyages sent for his daughter, when she was pregnant; and upon her giving birth to a son, he committed the child to Harpagus, his confidential attendant, with orders to kill the babe. But Harpagus gave the child to a herdsman who was to expose it.
However, since the herdsman's wife had brought forth a still born child, they substituted the latter for Mandane's child, which they reared as their own. When the child was ten years of age, his true parentage was discovered, and Cambyses sent for the child, in whose person he discovered the son of his daughter Mandane. The king forgave the herdsman, but revenged himself on Harpagus by serving up to him at a banquet the flesh of his own son. When Cyrus grew up, he conspired with Harpagus to dethrone his grandfather. They defeated him and the supremacy of Persia passed to Cyrus.
He next overthrew the Lydian monarchy, subdued the Greek cities in Asia Minor, made ware against the Assyrians, and captured Babylon. In his later attempt to subjugate the Massagetae, a Scythian people, he was slain, as related in the Chronicle. In the East Cyrus was long regarded as the greatest hero of antiquity, and hence the fables by which his history is obscured.
His sepulcher at Pasargada was visited by Alexander the Great; and although the tomb has perished, his name is found on monuments at Murghab, north of Persepolis. Persia is a country in Asia Major and derived its name from Perseus,[Perseus, the famous Argive hero, was a son of Zeus and Danae, and grandson of Acrisius. He occupies an important place in Greek mythology as the slayer of the Medusa, rescuer of Andromeda, etc. Danae, his daughter, was the mother of Perseus by Zeus, who defeated the plans of her father to keep her a virgin, by coming down upon her in her prison chamber in the form of a shower of gold.
He made Persepolis Persipolim the capital of the kingdom. This city was later burned by the Greeks, who conquered the country. Persia borders on Carmania, Bactria and Media, and is divided into many small countries. Nothing is known of his life. Some place him as early as Vespasian, others as late as Constantine. The earlier date is more probable. The first two are lost, and there are many gaps in the remaining eight. Although taken from good sources, the author frequently shows his ignorance of geography, chronology and tactics.
The country is largely mountainous, and because of the heat and wind it is not productive. It is said there are many wealthy cities in it, such as Persepolis and Pasargada,[Pasargada was the oldest of the two capitals of Persia, the other and later one being Persepolis. Pasargada is said to have been founded by Cyrus the Great on the spot where he gained his victory over Astyages. The tomb of Cyrus stood there in the midst of a beautiful park. Persepolis was situated in the heart of Persia, in the region called Hollow Persia, not far from the border of the Carmanian desert, in a beautiful and healthy valley.
The city stood on the north side of the Araxes, and had a citadel on the level surface of a rock. It was enclosed by triple walls, rising one above the other to the height of 16, 58 and 60 cubits, within which was the palace with its royal sepulcher and treasures. In the palace Alexander the Great found immense riches, which were said to have accumulated from the time of Cyrus.
It had been greatly enlarged and adorned by Darius I and Xerxes, and preserved its splendor till the Macedonian conquest, when it was burned. Alexander set fire to the palace, as the story goes, with his own hand, at the end of a revel, at the instigation of Thais the courtesan in BCE. It was not, however, so entirely destroyed as some historians think, for it appears frequently in subsequent history, both ancient and medieval. It is now deserted, but its ruins are considerable. Several rocky mountains, which Cambyses Cambises , the king's son, later added to the kingdom, lie between Persia and Susa, which contained many great buildings erected by Arphaxat.
And although the kingdom of Cyrus was formerly great, it was afterward broken up by the Macedonians and reduced in size. Nimrod Nembroth the giant was the first to teach the Persians to worship the sun and fire as gods, and to make sacrifices to the moon and Minerva. But now they have given up this idolatry, and follow the law of Mohammed Mahumeteam legem. From this city, as Pliny states in book 15, comes the fruit called Persica. The peach is a native of Persia, though now cultivated in all temperate climates. George comes from the East. Although we generally associate him with England, the particular veneration paid him in that country dates from the time of Richard I, who in the wars of Palestine, placed himself and his army under the especial protection of St.
It was not until that his feast was ordered to be kept as a holiday throughout England; and the institution of the Order of the Garter, in , seems to have completed his inauguration as a patron saint. Previous to the Normans, Edward the Confessor was the patron saint of England. George is particularly honored by the Greeks, who place him as a captain at the head of the noble army of martyrs, with the title of The Great Martyr. The reverence paid him in the East is of such great antiquity that one of the first churches erected by Constantine was in honor of St.
George, and this within twenty years after the Saint's death, as is supposed. This is the same St. George who slew the dragon. He was a native of Cappadocia, and was born of noble Christian parents. He is said to have lived in the time of Diocletian and to have been a tribute in the army. It is related that in travelling to join his legion he came to a certain city, called Selene, in Libya, which was being greatly troubled by the ravages of a monstrous dragon. And to this St. George put an end. At this time Diocletian issued his edict against the Christians, which was affixed to the gates and temples in public places.
Other men read it in terror, but St. George tore it down and trampled it under foot. For this he suffered martyrdom, enduring all manner of torture, finally being dispatched by the sword. According to legend St. George was condemned to martyrdom by Dacian, the proconsul. Unfortunately the chronicler does not give the authority upon which he connects the saint with the city of Persepolis. Anaximander, philosopher and celebrated scholar, was at first a disciple of Thales Taletia , and in time as Eusebeus states he became his successor in his school.
He was the first to teach things about the heavens and invented the notation of the hours. He first described the course of the earth and the sea, and the circuit of the heavens. Therefore Pliny in his second book called him a master of the stars. He died at the age of He was one of the earliest philosophers of the Ionian school, and the immediate successor of Thales, its first founder.
He first used the Greek word denoting the origin of things, or rather the material out of which they were formed. He was a careful observer of nature, and was distinguished by his astronomical, mathematical and geographical knowledge. Anaximenes, a philosopher and scientist, was a disciple of the Anaximander last mentioned. He contended that the air was the origin of all things , and that the stars do not move but pass by the earth endlessly. He died on the day as Laertius says Sardis was taken. He flourished about BCE; but as he was the teacher of Anaxagoras c.
He considered air to be the first cause of all things, the primary form, as it were, of matter, into which the elements of the universe are resolvable. The Ionian school of philosophers had its inception with Thales of Miletus, its founder Folio LIX recto , and is here continued as follows: Anaximander, immediate successor of Thales.
The youthful portrait of the Latin edition is replaced by an aged gentleman in the German edition. Anaximenes, third of the series of Ionian philosophers. Ezra Esdras , a pious and learned man, was esteemed and regarded as a second Moses by the people. He, together with others, was the first to return from Babylonia; but prompted by fatherly concern, he went back there in order to be of service to many more people in bringing them back also.
At this time he restored the laws and other holy books which the Chaldeans had burnt; and he also gave to the world a blessed testament in the form of books setting forth new experiences, and clearly written. After accomplishing this work with the aid of the Holy Spirit, he again returned with a great throng to Jerusalem, having the royal consent to teach the people. He died at a venerable age and was buried there. Ezra Greek from Esdras was a celebrated priest and leader of the Jewish nation. He was "a ready scribe in the law," a learned, able, and faithful man, and appears to have enjoyed great consideration at the Persian court.
During the eighty years embraced in his narrative, most of the reign of Cyrus passed, and the whole reign of Cambyses, Smerdis, Darius, Hystaspis, Xerxes, and eight years of Artaxerxes. From the last king he received letters, money, and very considerable help, and went at the head of a large party of returning exiles to Jerusalem in BCE Ezra 7. Here he instituted many reforms in the conduct of the people and in the public worship, and established synagogues, with reading of Scriptures and prayers Ezra ; Neh.
After this he generally believed to have written the books of Chronicles, Ezra, and part of Nehemiah; and to have collected and revised all the books of the Old Testament which form the present canon. In his work he was aided by Nehemiah and probably Malachi. The Book of Ezra contains a history written partly in Chaldea, of the return of the Jews from the time of Cyrus ch ; then, sixty years later, and comprising a single year ch. There are two apocryphal books ascribed to him under the name of Esdras. Darius was a cousin of Astyages, who gave him the kingdom.
Both were defeated by Cyrus, who was the first king of the Persians, and the monarchy was added to Persia. He defeated the Babylonians and slew Belshazzar, elevated Daniel, and permitted Israel to return and to rebuild the Temple; and he took good care of these captives.
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Cyrus bestowed Hyrcania on Astyages, and Media upon Darius. Nehemiah was a cupbearer to Artaxerxes the king of Persia, and was sent by him to restore the walls of Jerusalem. This he did during the captivity. He was a very good and pious man. When he accomplished this work of God, and found a miraculous fire, he dedicated the wall and returned to the king. Afterwards he again returned to Jerusalem. There he died and was buried beside the wall which he had constructed. He was born at Babylon during the captivity, and held the office of cupbearer to the Persian king Artaxerxes at Susa.
Touched by the calamitous state of the colony of Jews which had formerly returned to Jerusalem, he laid their case before God in penitent and importunate prayer, and at length begged the king to permit him to go to Jerusalem and aid in rebuilding it. He was accordingly sent there as governor about BCE, and directed his attention chiefly to the task of rebuilding the walls. The enmity of the Samaritans, under which the colony had formerly suffered, was not increased. Under great difficulties the wall was completed in one year. Nehemiah also instituted many civic improvements.
In BCE he returned to his post at the court of Babylon, but was later recalled to Jerusalem to reform certain growing irregularities—neglect of the Temple services, breaches of the Sabbath, intermarriage with pagans, etc. The Jews who had married pagan wives, he compelled to abandon them, or quit the country.
He rededicated the Temple, suppressed usury and exaction from the poor, fed the destitute, and provided for the Temple service. Cambyses Cambises , son of Cyrus, and second king of Persia, assumed the throne in the sixtieth year of the Jewish captivity and he reigned eight years. By Ezra he is called Artaxerxes or Ahasuerus Assuerus [], and in the Book of Judith he is referred to as the ancestor of Nebuchadnezzar. He forbade the building of the city of Jerusalem and its Temple. After he assumed the sovereignty he acted with military distinction and justice, but with an admixture of cruelty and haughtiness toward his subjects; and in the latter qualities he excelled his father.
He subjugated the Ethiopians, conducted many wars through Holofernes, journeyed to Egypt and there overran many lands, and there he built a second Babylon. Valerius says that Cambyses caused an unjust judge to be flayed, and his skin to be stretched upon the judgment seat, and he appointed the judge's son to sit on it as a judge in his father's place.
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In he conquered Egypt; but an army which he sent against the Ammonians perished in the sands, and the forces which he led in person against the Ethiopians were compelled by failure of provisions to return. On his return to Memphis he treated the Egyptians with great cruelty, insulting their religion and killing their god Apis with his own hands. He acted tyrannically toward his own family and the Persians in general. He caused his own brother Smerdis to be murdered; but a Magian impersonated the deceased prince and set up a claim to the throne.
Cambyses promptly set out from Egypt against the pretender, but died at Ecbatana in Syria of an accidental wound. His crimes provoked the rebellion in which the pseudo-Smerdis secured the throne. Mordecai Mardocheus , the holy man, was at this time highly renowned throughout the kingdom of Persia. He flourished in the year , according to the Latin reckoning. Smerdis, third king of Persia, reigned seven months in the sixty-eighth year of the Jewish captivity, for Cambyses died without heirs.
Patizithes Patizetes , whom Cambyses had placed in charge of his possessions, proclaimed as king his own brother, who had the same name and bore a likeness to the king, and he killed the elder one. Because of this treacherous deceit, Darius, the son of Hystaspis Histaspis , soon afterwards killed this second Smerdis and his brother Patizithes; and after three days he himself was made king of the Persians.
Smerdis, son of Cyrus, was murdered by order of his brother Cambyses. The death was kept a profound secret; and accordingly when the Persians became weary of the tyranny of Cambyses, one of the Magians, name Patizithes, who had been left by Cambyses in charge of his palace and treasures, availed himself of the likeness of his brother to the deceased Smerdis, to proclaim this brother king, representing him as the younger son of Cyrus. Cambyses heard of the revolt while in Syria, but he died of an accidental wound in the thigh as he was mounting his horse to march against the usurper.
The Persians acknowledged the pseudo-Smerdis as king, and he reigned for seven months without opposition. The leading Persian nobles were not, however, free from suspicion, and this suspicion was increased because the king never invited any of them to the palace, and never appeared in public. Among these nobles was Otanes, whose daughter Phaedima had been one of the wives of Cambyses, and had been transferred to his successor.
The new king had some years before being deprived of his ears by Cyrus for some offense. Otanes persuaded his daughter to ascertain whether her master had really lost his ears. Having ascertained that such was the fact and given the information to her father, the latter formed a conspiracy, and in conjunction with other Persian nobles, succeeded in forcing his way into the palace, where they slew the false Smerdis and his brother Patizithes in the eighth month of their reign, The usurpation of the false Smerdis was an attempt on the part of the Medes, to whom the Magians belonged, to obtain the supremacy, of which they had been deprived by Cyrus.
The assassination of the false Smerdis and the accession of Darius Hystaspis again gave the ascendancy to the Persians; and the anniversary of the day on which the Magians were massacred, was commemorated among the Persians by a solemn festival, called Magophonia. On this day no Magian was allowed to show himself in public. The nature of the transaction is also shown by the revolt of the Medes that followed the ascension of Darius. Holofernes, a general of the hosts of Nebuchadnezzar, subjugated much territory for him; and finally marched against Bethulia; and there he was slain in his bedchamber by Judith, a widow of rare disposition and incredible beauty, and all his hosts dispersed.
After she had done away with Holofernes she was held in esteem by the Jews to such an extent that for the rest of her days she was honored and elevated by praises of her victory and everlastingly prized. And when she had attained the age of one hundred and fifty years she was buried beside her husband with great pomp and lamentations. Nebuchadnezzar, king of the Assyrians at Nineveh, made war against him, and summoned all who dwelled in the lands between Persia and Memphis to his aid.
Vowing vengeance, he marched alone against Arphaxad and destroyed him. Later he appoints Holofernes general over his army, and sends him against the nations which refused to aid him. He lays siege to Bethulia, a city of the Israelites. They lose heart and urge Ozias and the rulers to give way. Now in those days there lived a widow named Judith, of rare piety and beauty. She blames Ozias and the rulers for considering submission, and urges them to place their trust in God.
The rulers excuse themselves, and Judith promises to do for them something that shall go down to all generations. She decks herself bravely and goes to the camp of Holofernes accompanied by her maid, who carries a bottle of wine, a cruse of oil, and a bag filled with parched corn and fine bread and cheese.
She tells him that her nation cannot be punished, neither can the sword prevail against them, except they sin against their God, but that now they are about to eat all those things which God charged them not to eat, and that they will therefore be delivered into his hands. She offers to show the way to the town, and to lead him until he comes to Jerusalem.
Holfernes is pleased and invites her to a banquet, and she accepts. He drinks deeply and is left alone with her. Praying to God for strength, she smites off his head with his own scimitar; and putting the head into her bag of victuals, she hastens to Bethulia. The next morning the Israelites fall upon their besiegers, who, finding their leader dead, lose heart and flee in wild disorder. After a long life Judith dies at the age of years, and was buried at Bethulia in the cave of her husband Manasseh.
Judith is here represented by a special woodcut. She wears the headdress and garb of the time of woodcutter. Her veil flutters about her, and in her right hand she holds a sword on the extreme sharp point of which is poised, like a marshmallow for toasting, the head of Holofernes. His eyes are closed in death, his mouth is wide open. The other hand of the heroine is engaged in bestowing a blessing. With the exceptions of the portrait of Ezra labeled Edras, a misspelling of Esdras and the special woodcut of Judith and Holofernes, all of the portraits on this page are different in the German edition of the Chronicle.
In the th year after the building of the city of Rome, when the line of the Roman kings came to an end, the people appointed consuls in the place of kings, who were to govern for but one year so that in the passage of years they would not become too arrogant. Of these we will here mention the foremost. The first two conducted a war against Porsena Porsemia [Porsena or Porsenna, Lars, king of the Etruscan town of Chisium, marched against Rome at the head of a vast army in order to restore Tarquinius Superbus to the throne.
But the campaign did not accomplish its object. Brutus had two sons who wanted to re-establish the kingship. Brutus caused them to be beaten with rods and then to be killed with an axe. Collatinus was relieved of his office, for it was decided that the name of Tarquinius was to be banished from the city of Rome.
Junius Brutus was the son of M. Junius and Tarquinia, the sister of Tarquinius Superbus. His elder brother was murdered by Tarquinius, and Lucius escaped his brother's fate only by feigning idiocy, from which he received the name Brutus. The story of the rape of Lucretia, wife of L. Tarquinius Collatinus, by Sextus the son of Tarquinius Superbus, and the consequent expulsion of the latter and his sons has already been related. It was Brutus who incited the Romans to this course, and it was he and Tarquinius Collatinus who were set up as the first consuls to govern the empire in lieu of a king; but as the people could not endure the rule of any of the hated race of the Tarquins, Collatinus resigned his office and retired from Rome to Lavinium.
The Cumaean Sibyl Sibylla Cumana , who lived in the time of Tarquinius Priscus, is clad in a dress of gold, and has a tall open book in her hand, and also a book in the left hand, resting on her knee. Her head is bare. She foretold that out of eternity a miraculous birth would take place in this world through a virgin; and that the iron people would come to an end and a golden people would spring up.
The mention of the Cumaean Sibyl at this point is apparently intended merely as a description of the opposite portrait, which, however, in no way conforms to the description. In the portrait she has no book in either hand, nor on her knee. She is not bareheaded, but wears a flowing veil. Her hands are in an attitude of gesture. These two Romans referring to woodcut opposite defeated the Sabines and were accorded a triumph; but Valerius died poor.
The reference is apparently to P. Valerius Publicola and Posthumus. Publicola took part in the expulsion of the Tarquins, and was thereupon elected consul with Brutus BCE. He secured the liberties of the people by several laws and ordered the lectors to lower the fasces before the people as an acknowledgement that their rights were superior to those of the consuls. He died in In the opposite portrait Publicola is associated with Postumus without text reference to the latter. Two hundred twenty-five years after the building of Rome, the Romans, having been defeated by the Sabines, elected a regent whom they called a dictator, with authority and powers greater than those of the consuls.
This was a worthy office. He slew a Gaul who challenged him, took away his golden necklace, and put it about his own neck. For this reason he and his descendants were called Torquati, which means necklace. Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, son of L. Manlius is said to have been dull of mind in his youth, and was brought up by his father in the in the country.
When the tribune M. Pomponius accused the elder Manlius on account of the cruelties he had practiced in his dictatorship, he endeavored to excite public enmity against him by representing him as a cruel and tyrannical father. As soon as the younger Manlius heard of this he hurried to Rome, obtained admission to Pomponius early in the morning and compelled the tribune by threatening him with instant death to take an oath to drop the accusation against his father. In Manlius served under the dictator T. Quintius Pennus in the war against the Gauls, and in this campaign earned immortal glory by slaying a gigantic Gaul, from whose dead body he took the chain torquis which had adorned him, and placed it about his own neck.
From this circumstance he obtained the surname Torquatus. He was dictator in and again in He was also consul three times. Torquatus and his colleague P. Decius Mus gained a great victory over the Latins at the foot of Vesuvius, which established forever the supremacy of Rome over Latium. Shortly before the battle, when the two armies were encamped opposite one another, the consuls published a proclamation that no Roman should engage in single combat with a Latin on pain of death.
But the young Manlius, the son of the consul, provoked by the insults of a Tuscan noble, accepted his challenge, slew his adversary, and bore the bloody spoils in triumph to his father.
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Death was his reward. The consul would not overlook this breach of discipline, and the unhappy youth was executed by the lector in the presence of the assembled army. This severe sentence rendered Torquatus an object of detestation among the Roman youths as long as he lived; and the recollection of his severity was preserved in after ages by the expression Manliana imperia. The Senonian Gauls were by nature a cruel and uncivilized people, and by reason of their great stature and their weapons a frightful race born, as it seems, for the extinction of mankind and the destruction of the city of Rome.
These barbarians leveled and devastated the whole city with fire and sword for six months. Their chief town was Agendicum, afterwards called Senones Sens. A portion of this people crossed the Alps about BCE, in order to settle in Italy; and as the greater part of Upper Italy was already occupied by other Celtic tribes, they were obliged to penetrate a considerable distance to the south, and took up their abode on the Adriatic Sea between the rivers Utis and Aesis between Ravenna and Ancona after expelling the Umbrians. In this country they founded the town of Sena.
They extended their ravages into Etruria; and it was in consequence of the interference of the Romans, while they were laying siege to Clusium, that they marched against Rome and took the city in BCE. From this time we find them engaged in constant hostilities with the Romans, till they were at length completely subdued and the greater part of them destroyed by the consul Dolabella in One night when the Gauls endeavored to ascend the Capitol, Manlius was aroused from his sleep by the cackling of the geese.
Hastily collecting a body of men, he succeeded in driving off the enemy, who had just reached the summit of the hill. From this heroic deed he is said to have received the surname Capitolinus. In he defended the cause of the plebians, who were suffering from their debts and the cruel treatment of their harsh patrician creditors.
The patricians accused him of aspiring to royal power, and he was thrown into prison by the dictator Cornelius Cossus. The plebians put on mourning for their champion, and were ready to take up arms in his behalf, when the patricians became alarmed and released Manlius; but this act of concession made him bolder, and he instigated the plebeians to open violence. In the following year the patricians brought him to trial on a charge of high treason. He was condemned, and the tribunes threw him down the Tarpeian rock. The members of the Manlia gens accordingly resolved that none of them should ever bear in future the praenomen of Marcus.
In the time of these two Romans referring to a dual portrait of Marcus and Aeneas Manlius , occurred the Vientian Vegentian wars in which as many of the victorious Romans fell as defeated Vientians. It possessed a strongly fortified citadel, built on a steep hill.
It was one of the twelve cities of the Etrurian Confederacy, and apparently the largest of all. It was about seven miles in circumference, equal in size to Athens, and was a powerful city at the time of the foundation of Rome. The Veientians were engaged in almost constant hostilities with Rome for more than three and one half centuries, and there is a record of fourteen distinct wars between the two peoples.
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Veii was at length taken by the dictator Camillus after a siege which is said to have lasted ten years. The city fell into his hands, according to the common story doubted by Livy and Plutarch , by means of a cuniculus or mine that was dug all the way from the Roman camp under the city into the citadel of Veii. So well built was the city that the Romans were anxious after the destruction of their own city by the Gauls in BCE to remove to Veii; but the eloquence of Camillus against this plan finally prevailed.
So Veii was abandoned; but after the lapse of ages it was colonized by Augustus, and made a Roman municipum. But by the time of Hadrian the city again sank into decay. From this time Veii disappears entirely from history. It stood in the neighborhood of the present Isola Farnese. In the ninth year after the conclusion of the Roman line of kings as Eusebius states the new office of Dictator was established in Rome; also that of Master of the Horse, who was subordinate to the dictator in all things. Largus became the first dictator, and Sp.
Cassius the first Master of the Horse. The dictator was superior in power to the consuls against the enemies of the state. A dictator in ancient times was an extraordinary magistrate in the Roman commonwealth. Emphasis was thus placed on the military aspect of the dictatorship, and, in fact, the office seems to have been instituted for the purpose of meeting a military crisis too serious for the annual consuls with their divided command.
The repression of civil discord was one of the motives for the institution of a dictatorship. This function of the office is attested by the internal history of Rome. In the crisis of the agitation at the time of the Licinian laws BCE a dictator was appointed. The dictator appointed to meet the dangers of war, sedition, or crime, was described as "the administrative dictator. These dictators retired from office as soon as their function was completed; but the administrative dictator held office for six months. The powers of a dictator were a temporary revival of those of the kings, with some limitations.
He was never concerned with civil jurisdiction. His military authority was confined to Italy; and his power of life and death was limited. By the lex Valeria of BCE he was made subject to the right of criminal appeal within the limits of the city. However, all the magistrates of the people were regarded as his subordinates. The dictator was nominated by one of the consuls. But the senate claimed authority over the magistrates, and suggested not only the nomination but also the name of the nominee. After the nomination, the imperium of the dictator was confirmed by a lex curiata.
To emphasize the superiority of this imperium, the dictator might be preceded by 24 lectors, and, at least in the earlier period of the office, these lectors bore the axes, the symbol of life and death, within the city walls. The first dictator is said to have been created in BCE; the last of the "administrative" dictators belongs to the year BCE. The epoch of the Second Punic War was marked by experiments with the office, such as the election of Q.
Fabius Maximus by the people, and the co-dictatorship of M. The emergency office of the early and middle republic has little in common with the dictatorship as revived by Sulla and by Caesar. That of the former took on the form of a provisional government. Sulla was created dictator "for the establishment of a republic. Ostensibly to prevent its further use for such a purpose, M. Antonius in 44 BCE carried a law abolishing the dictatorship. The term is used in our day to designate a tyrannical ruler. Under the consulship of this Valerius referring to the portrait opposite , the exiled citizens and the fugitive slaves invaded the capitol and burned it.
It was a gruesome war, and the consul himself was slain. Publicola as well, who was also a Roman patrician, to whom the name previously had been Publius Valerius, at this time, when the Tarquins had been expelled, together with Brutus was made consul in place of Collatinus as mentioned above. He himself, when the battle had been engaged in which Brutus died, killed fifteen thousand three hundred men from the army of the Tarquins. And with this victory he was the first of the consuls who, carried in his chariot, celebrated a triumph, a thing that provided a very lovely spectacle to the common people without any envy.
He was, moreover, a man of great justice and fairness. The Lineage of the Roman Consuls begins here. It consists of a panel of the following portraits: Brutus and Tarquinius Tarquinus Collatinus, jointly the first consuls of Rome, until the latter was forced to resign; represented by a commonplace double portrait of two men facing one another and gesturing. Valerius Publicola and Postumus, a commonplace dual portrait of men in medieval dress. Largus, first dictator, a rather imposing portrait of a distinguished looking medieval citizen—gesturing as usual.
The Decem Tribuni, a group of ten magistrates of ancient Rome, injected into the lineage of the Roman consuls. They are represented by a small group-portrait. Marcus and Aeneas Manlius; dual portrait of not particular significance. Valerius, apparently a relative of Valerius Publicola; represented by a woodcut of an old man. The Cumaean Sibyl has been assigned a portrait that does not agree with the text of the Chronicle. Manlius Manilius Torquatus, strangely represented holding an open book instead of being portrayed as a soldier.
Popilia the Vestal Virgin; small woodcut of a rather sad looking middle-aged woman, without headdress or veil, arms folded. Aratus Aracus , the highly renowned astrologer and poet, distinguished himself, as Augustine states, in that, together with Eudoxus, he comprehended and described all the stars.
However, Augustine states that this is contrary to the Scriptures, in which God spoke to Abraham, saying: Look at the stars, count them if you can. But how can they all be counted since they cannot all be seen? And as Aratus was not unfamiliar with astrology, he wrote an excellent book of beautiful verses on the subject[Aratus was the author of two Greek astronomical poems, which have generally been joined together, as if parts of the same work.
The design is to give an introduction to the knowledge of the constellations, with the rules for their risings and settings; and of the circles of the sphere, amongst which the milky way is reckoned. The positions of the constellations, north of the ecliptic, are described by reference to the principal groups surrounding the North Pole the Bears, the Dragon and Cepheus , while Orion serves as a point of departure for those to the South. The immobility of the earth, and the revolution of the heavens about a fixed axis are maintained; the path of the sun in the Zodiac is described; but the planets are introduced merely as bodies having a motion of their own, without any attempt to define their periods; nor is anything said about the moon's orbit.
The opening of the poem asserts the dependence of all things upon Zeus. From the general lack of precision in the descriptions it would seem that Aratus was neither a mathematician nor an observer; or, at any rate, that in this work he did not aim at scientific accuracy.
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Such is the first poem, which consists of verses. The second, consisting of verses, is made up of prognostications of the weather from astronomical phenomena, with an account of its effects upon animals. The style of these two poems is distinguished by the elegance and accuracy of their diction, resulting from a study of ancient models; but it lack originality and poetic elevation; and variety of matter is excluded by the nature of the subjects. Several other poetical works on various subjects, as well as a number of prose epistles, are attributed to Aratus; but none of them have come down to us.
The German edition of the does not cite the quote from Cicero's text, nor does it even mention the actual book by Cicero, stating only: In the midst of the city of Rome appeared a horrible gap or crevice, and the soothsayers interpreted this as portending the burial of a living person. Then at Rome as Livy states , the earth opened up in a public place, and a wide chasm was formed without displacement of the soil or other force; and it could not be filled with any material. Marcus Curtius heard about this, and he thought of the temples of the gods in the vicinity.
He mounted his beautiful horse, and fully accoutered, he leaped into the chasm for love of his country. And when he died the chasm closed. According to one tradition, the Lacus Curtius, which was part of the Roman forum, was called after him, because in the battle with the Romans he escaped with difficulty from a swamp into which his horse had plunged.
But the more usual tradition respecting the name of Lacus Curtius is that in BCE the earth in the forum gave way, and a great chasm appeared, which the soothsayers declared could only be filled up by throwing into it Rome's greatest treasure; that thereupon M. Curtius, a noble youth, mounted his steed in full armour; and declaring that Rome possessed no greater treasure than a brave and gallant citizen, leaped into the abyss; upon which the earth closed over him. Aesop Esopus Adelphus, the highly renowned poet and teller of fairy tales, flourished in the time of Cyrus, the Persian king.
He was a Greek, intelligent and witty, and composed excellent fables, which Romulus afterwards translated from the Greek tongue into Latin and sent to his son Tibertinus. In his stories Aesop taught people how they were to conduct themselves; and to this end he gave speech to the birds, trees and irrational animals. If these fables are carefully studied, one will find in them not only matter for admonishment and laughter, but for sharpening of one's wits. It is said that Aesop was slain in the first year of Cyrus.
Aesop, author of Fables about animals, generally with a didactic purpose, which have given their name to a whole class of stories, lived about to BCE. According to tradition he was the slave of Iadmon of Samos and met with a violent death at the hands of the inhabitants of Delphi. When a pestilence came upon them the Delphians offered a reward for his death, and it was claimed by Iadmon, grandson of Aesop's old master.
Herodotus, who is authority for this 2. Aesop must have been freed by Iadmon, or he could not have conducted the defense of a Samian demagogue Aristotle, Rhetoric 2. Legend says that he afterwards lived at the court of Croesus, where he met Solon, and dined in the company of the Seven Sages of Greece with Periander at Corinth. The obscurity in which the history of Aesop is involved has induced some scholars to deny his existence altogether. Rinutius translated Aesop's fables in in Milan.
This book may be the first printed edition of a Greek author the text provides both the Greek original and a Latin translation in Western Europe. In the twelfth year of the kingdom of Artaxerxes, and years [The German edition of the changes this number of years to Saxtillus Capitolinus were consuls, the Romans decided to suspend the power of the consuls, and elected ten men by whom the city was to be ruled without tumult.
The period of their rule was a happy one as Livy says ; but they later exceeded their authority and fell. After a year had elapsed, they were removed because of the misdeeds of Claudius Appius. His real character now betrayed itself in the most tyrannical conduct toward the plebeians till his attempt against Virginia led to the overthrow of the decemvirate. Appius was impeached by Virginius, but did not live to abide his trial.
He either killed himself, or was put to death in prison by order of the tribunes. Inasmuch as the Romans had no laws up to this time, and a dispute arose between the tribunes, who judged various matters for the common people, and the consuls, the Romans, in the 13th year of Artaxerxes, sent messengers to Athens, who not only brought back the laws of Solon, but also the laws and customs of other Greek cities. From these laws ten tables were prepared, and two tables were added to those by the Romans; so originated the celebrated Law of the Twelve Tables, in which the entire law was codified.
Greed for riches gave rise to a fourth conflict; so the common people created magistrates. Fabius Ambustus, the father of two daughters , gave one to Sulpicius, a man of patrician blood, and the other to a plebeian. Sulpicus, and the younger to C. The younger daughter Fabia induced her father to assist her husband in obtaining the consulship for the plebeian order, into which she had married. He ruled from BCE. In compromise the people were allowed to choose their own magistrates from their own order, who were to have the power of opposing with effect every measure which they might judge in anyway prejudicial to their interest.
These new magistrates were to be elected annually. At first they were five in number, but in time they were increased to ten. They were called tribunes because the first of them was chosen from among the tribune militum of the different legions. Their authority was confined to the city limits and one mile beyond the walls. Two officers, called Aediles, were appointed to aid them. The Aediles had charge of the public buildings, and later, also of the games, spectacles, and other matters of police within the city.
Veturia, the mother of Coriolanus, the Roman consul, was an old woman at this time. By good works she lengthened her years to eternal youth. When Coriolanus without cause besieged the city, and refused to see the embassies that were sent to him, and would not listen to the high priests, his mother diverted him from his stubborn anger and from the course which he had entered upon.
He abandoned the siege and released the city. In gratitude to those women the Romans erected a temple; and afterwards no honor was withheld from the women by the men. And the Romans ordained that the people should stand up for the women, and give them the right of way; a custom which to this day is still observed by the respectable. It was also considered fit and proper for the women to wear gold, purple dresses, and golden girdles and ornaments.
His original name was C. Marcius, and he received the surname Coriolanus from the heroism he displayed at the capture of the Volscian town of Corioli. But his haughty bearing toward the common people excited their fear and dislike, and when he was a candidate for the consulship they refused to elect him. After this, when there was a famine in the city, and a Greek prince sent corn from Sicily, Coriolanus advised that it should not be distributed to the commons until they should give up their tribunes. For this he was impeached and condemned to exile in BCE. He now took refuge among the Volscians, and promised to assist them in a war against the Romans.