Book Review: Lays of Ancient Rome

Title: Lays of Ancient Rome

Author: Thomas Babington Macaulay

Date: 1838, 1912

Publisher: Longmans Green (1912)

ISBN: none

Length: 191 pages

Illustrations: black-and-white drawings by J.R.Weguelin

Quote: "'Where,' Cicero mournfully asks, `are those old verses now?"

Scott's literary ballads were selling well. Macaulay wanted to cash in on a trend when he wrote four long ballads that attempt to replace the ones Rome had lost by Cicero's time, and two more about more recent history. Thus his little book of "lays." "Lay" was deliberately chosen as an archaic word for a ballad. The book was a bestseller and was on school reading lists for many years before teachers decided the word "lays" was too distracting for high school audiences.

So it's one of those classic books that one can't review so much as announce. I have a copy, a solid library-bound 1912 reprint with lots of charming pictures. The horses aren't very well drawn, but the people and places are. The print is large and clear; the paper is glossy and mold-resistant. It is a public library discard, but public libraries are so recklessly throwing away their classics and nonfiction that that hardly even makes a difference any more.

What you'll love about Macaulay's Lays: They are literary ballads--too long to be really singable--but they positively beg to be read aloud, chanted, even sung.

"And how can men die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of their fathers
And the temples of their gods?"

Macaulay warned readers, at length, not to rely on these ballads as history. Like the European folk ballads that were being collected and printed, they're based on legends. Facts may have been deliberately falsified, or garbled. The first Lay, and best known, deals with the legend of Horatius defending the narrow bridge over the Tiber river. Roman historians agreed that the man and the battle existed. They agree that the bridge was narrow but not whether the attackers had to cross is by ones, by twos, or by threes. Horatius, anyway, volunteered to defend it, either alone, with two friends behind him, or with one friend on either side; historians disagree. They also disagree on what happened after the rest of the Roman army broke the other side of the bridge, whether Horatius (and friends?) scrambled or swam back to the Roman side of the river, or was (or were) killed. Macaulay suspects that the historians were getting their facts form those long-lost ancient ballads, in which different versions might have ended the story differently. He chose the version that he thought made the best story.

These are clean, crisp, vigorous ballads, too, written for marching rather than slow-dancing tunes. They have always appealed to people who were tired of reading about Romantic Love.

What's harder to like is Macaulay's frankness about the horrors of war. There was a belief that, since wars had to be fought, boys had to be educated to think of gory battles as part of life. The climactic scene of each ballad is a violent death.

"On Astar's throat Horatius
Right firmly pressed his heel,
And thrice and four times tugged amain
Ere he wrenched out the steel."

That's a verse I thought Google could handle. They get bloodier than that. Each of the five complete ballads contains verses that describe violent deaths in enough graphic detail to violate this web site's contract.