Puslapio vaizdai
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in war for twenty years together, with so much valour and success) from the very Pillars of Hercules, from the ocean, from the utmost bounds of the earth, through so many warlike nations of Spain and Gaul, are you not come hither victorious? And with whom are you now to fight? With raw soldiers, an undisciplined army, beaten, vanquished, besieged by the Gauls the very last summer; an army unknown to their leader, and unacquainted with him.

Or shall I, who was born I might almost say, but certainly brought up, in the tent of my father, that most excellent general; shall I, the conqueror of Spain and Gaul, and not only of the Alpine nations, but, which is greater yet, of the Alps themselves, shall I compare myself with this half-year captain? A captain before whom should one place the two armies without their ensigns, I am persuaded he would not know to which of them he is consul? I esteem it no small advantage, soldiers, that there is not one among you, who has not often been an eye-witness of my exploits in war; not one of whose valour I myself have not been a spectator, so as to be able to name the times and places of his noble achievements; that with soldiers, whom I have a thousand times praised and rewarded, and whose pupil I was before I became their general, I shall march against an army of men, strangers to one another.

On what side soever I turn my eyes, I behold all full of courage and strength; a veteran infantry, a most gallant cavalry; you, my allies, most faithful and valiant; you, Carthaginians, whom not only your country's cause, but the justest anger impels to battle. The hope, the courage of assailants, is always greater than of those who act upon the defensive. With hostile banners displayed, you are come down upon Italy; you bring the war. Grief, injuries, indignities, fire your minds, and spur you forward to revenge. -First, they demand me; that I, your general, should be delivered up to them; next, all of you who had fought at the siege of Saguntum; and we were to be put to death by the extremest tortures. Proud and cruel nation! every thing must be yours, and at your disposal! You are to prescribe to us with whom we shall make war, with whom we shall make peace! You are to set us bounds; to shut us up within hills and rivers; but you-you are not to observe the

limits which yourselves have fixed? Pass not the Iberus What next? Touch not the Saguntines; is Saguntum upon the Iberus? move not a step towards that city. Is it a small matter, then, that you have deprived us of our ancient possessions, Sicily and Sardinia? you would have Spain too? Well, we shall yield Spain; and then-you will pass into Africa! Will pass, did I say ?-this very year they ordered one of their consuls into Africa, the other into Spain. No, soldiers, there is nothing left for us but what we can vindicate with our swords. Come on, then,-be men. The Romans may with more safety be cowards; they have their own country behind them, have places of refuge to flee to, and are secure from danger in the roads thither; but for you there is no middle fortune between death and victory. Let this be but well fixed in your minds, and once again, I say, you are conquerors LIVY.

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WERE you, soldiers, the same army which I had with me in Gaul, I might well forbear saying anything to you at this time. For what occasion could there be, to use exhortation to a cavalry, that had so signally vanquished the squadrons of the enemy upon the Rhone? or to legions, by whom that same enemy, flying before them to avoid a battle, did, in effect, confess themselves conquered? but as these troops, having been enrolled for Spain, are there with my brother Cneius, making war under my auspices (as was the will of the senate and people of Rome), I, that you might have a consul for your captain against Hannibal and the Carthaginians, have freely offered myself for this war. You, then, have a new general; and I a new army. On this account,

a few words from me to you will be neither improper nor unseasonable.

That you may not be unapprized of what sort of enemies you are going to encounter, or of what is to be feared from them, they are the very same, whom, in a former war, you vanquished both by land and sea; the same from whom you took Sicily and Sardinia; and who have been these twenty years your tributaries. You will not, I presume, march against these men with only that courage with which you are

wont to face other enemies; but with a certain anger and indignation, such as you would feel, if you saw your slaves, on a sudden, rise up in arms against you. Conquered and enslaved, it is not boldness, but necessity, that urges them to battle; unless you can believe, that those who avoided fighting when their army was entire, have acquired better hope by the loss of two-thirds of their horse and foot in the passage of the Alps.

But you have heard, perhaps, that, though they are few in number, they are men of stout hearts and robust bodies; heroes of such strength and vigour as nothing is able to resist.- Mere effigies! nay, shadows of men! wretches emaciated with hunger and benumbed with cold! bruised and battered to pieces among the rocks and craggy cliffs; their weapons broken, and their horses weak and foundered! Such are the cavalry, and such the infantry, with which you are going to contend: not enemies, but the fragments of enemies. There is nothing which I more apprehend, than that it will be thought Hannibal was vanquished by the Alps, before we had any conflict with him. But, perhaps, it was fitting it should be so; and that, with a people and a leader who had violated leagues and covenants, the gods themselves, without man's help, should begin the war, and bring it to a near conclusion; and that we, who, next to the gods, have been injured and offended, should happily finish what they have begun.

I need not be in any fear, that you should suspect me of saying these things, merely to encourage you, while inwardly I have different sentiments. What hindered me from going into Spain? That was my province; where I should have had the less dreaded Asdrubal, not Hannibal, to deal with. But hearing, as I passed along the coast of Gaul, of this enemy's march, I landed my troops, sent the horse forward, and pitched my camp upon the Rhone. A part of my cavalry encountered and defeated that of the enemy. My infantry not being able to overtake theirs, which fled before us, I returned to my fleet; and, with all the expedition I could use in so long a voyage by sea and land, am come to meet them at the foot of the Alps. Was it then my inclination to avoid a contest with this t tremendous Hannibal ? and have I met with him only by accident and unawares?

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SPECIMENS OF ANCIENT ELOQUENCE.

or am I come on purpose to challenge him to the combat? I would gladly try, whether the earth, within these twentyyears, has brought forth a new kind of Carthaginians; or, whether they be the same sort of men who fought at the Ægates; and whom, at Eryx, you suffered to redeem themselves at eighteen denarii per head; whether this Hannibal, for labours and journeys, be, as he would be thought, the rival of Hercules; or whether he be, what his father left him, a tributary, a vassal, a slave of the Roman people. Did not the consciousness of his wicked deed at Saguntum torment him, and make him desperate, he would have some regard, if not to his conquered country, yet surely to his own family, to his father's memory, to the treaty written with Amilcar's own hand. We might have starved him at Eryx; we might have passed into Africa with our victorious fleet, and in a few days have destroyed Carthage. At their humble supplication, we pardoned them; we released them, when they were closely shut up, without a possibility of escaping; we made peace with them, when they were conquered. When they were distressed by the African war, we considered them, we treated them, as a people under our protection. And what is the return they make us for all these favours? Under the conduct of a hare-brained young man, they come hither to overturn our state, and lay waste our country. I could wish, indeed, that it were not so; and that the war we are now engaged in concerned only our glory, and not our preservation. But the contest at present is not for the possession of Sicily and Sardinia, but of Italy itself. Nor is there behind us another army, which, if we should not prove the conquerors, may make head against our

victorious enemies. There are no more Alps for them to pass, which might give us leisure to raise new forces. No, soldiers; here you must make your stand, as if you were just now before the walls of Rome. Let every one reflect, that he is now to defend, not his own person only, but his wife, his children, his helpless infants. Yet, let not private considerations alone possess our minds; let us remember, that the eyes of the senate and people of Rome are upon us; and that, as our force and courage shall now prove, such will be the fortune of that city, and of the Roman empire.

HOOKE.

On the Slides or Inflections of Verse.

1. THE first general rule for reading verse is, that we ought to give it that measured harmonious flow of sound which distinguishes it from prose, without falling into a bombastic, chanting pronunciation, which makes it ridiculous.

2. It will not be improper, before we read verse with its poetical graces, to pronounce it exactly as if it were prose: this will be depriving verse of its beauty, but will tend to preserve it from deformity: the tones of voice will be frequently different, but the inflections will be nearly the same.

3. But though an elegant and harmonious pronunciation of verse will sometimes oblige us to adopt different inflections from those we use in prose, it may still be laid down as a good general rule, that verse requires the same inflections as prose, though less strongly marked, and more approaching to monotones.

4. Wherever a sentence, or member of a sentence, would necessarily require the falling inflection in prose, it ought always to have the same inflection in poetry; for though, if we were to read verse prosaically, we should often place the falling inflection where the style of verse would require the rising, yet in those parts where a portion of perfect sense, or the conclusion of a sentence, necessarily requires the falling inflection, the same inflection must be adopted both in verse and prose.

5. In the same manner, though we frequently suspend the voice by the rising inflection in verse, where, if the composition were prose, we should adopt the falling, yet, wherever in prose the member or sentence would necessarily require the rising inflection, this inflection must necessarily be adopted in verse.

6. It may be observed, indeed, that it is in the frequent use of the rising inflection, where prose would adopt the falling, that the song of poetry consists; familiar, strong, argumentative subjects naturally enforce the language with the falling inflection, as this is naturally expressive of activity, force, and precision; but grand, beautiful, and plaintive subjects slide naturally into the rising inflection, as this is expressive of awe, admiration, and melancholy, where the mind may be said to be passive; and it is this general tendency of the plaintive tone to assume the rising inflection, which inclines injudicious readers to adopt it at those pauses where the falling inflection is absolutely necessary, and for want of which the pronunciation degenerates into the whine, so much and so justly disliked; for it is very remarkable, that if, where the sense concludes, we are careful to preserve the falling inflection, and let the voice drop into the natural talking tone,

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