Lays of Ancient Rome

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Томас Бабингтон Маколей. Lays of Ancient Rome

Lays of Ancient Rome

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Horatius

The Battle of the Lake Regillus

Virginia

The Prophecy of Capys

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Thomas Babington Macaulay

Epic Poems

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The proposition, then, that Rome had ballad-poetry is not merely in itself highly probable, but is fully proved by direct evidence of the greatest weight.

This proposition being established, it becomes easy to understand why the early history of the city is unlike almost everything else in Latin literature, native where almost everything else is borrowed, imaginative where almost everything else is prosaic. We can scarcely hesitate to pronounce that the magnificent, pathetic, and truly national legends, which present so striking a contrast to all that surrounds them, are broken and defaced fragments of that early poetry which, even in the age of Cato the Censor, had become antiquated, and of which Tully had never heard a line.

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