The Anathemata
Middle-sea and Lear-sea (continued)
adjuvant at the caving
flank; the watering of mounts last groomed at heaven’s horselines, the care of celestial arms, their working parts fouled in terrestrial war, the scrubbing-off of front-area muck from unearthly equipment at a pond, in the market-place
in broad day
as large as life
a thing seen of many
so they do say1
(They can show you the piscene.)2
David Jones notes
1 Cf. the traditions surrounding the battle of Lake Regillus which, very long before we had so much as heard of Livy, the majority of us learned by heart from The Lays and owing to the easy facility of Macaulay’s rhymes are unable, if we would, to forget. From Macaulay we first sensed that we belonged to the Roman world and that Vesta, Juno, Romulus, Praeneste, ‘reedy Thrasymene’, and most of all ‘the Great Asylum’, had an evocative power over us.
2 I am told the fountain where Castor and Pollux washed their armour after the Battle of Lake Regillus is still shown to visitors in Rome.
additional notes
DJ note 1:
Lake Regillus was located in the relic of a volcanic crater between Rome and Tusculum. The lake was drained in the fourth century BCE. The Battle of Lake Regillus was a legendary Roman victory over the Latin League shortly after the establishment of the Roman Republic. The Latins were led by an elderly Lucius Tarquinius Superbus, the seventh and last King of Rome, who had been expelled in 509 BCE, and his son-in-law, Octavius Mamilius, the dictator of Tusculum. The battle marked the final attempt of the Tarquins to reclaim their throne. According to legend, Castor and Pollux fought on the side of the Romans.
Praeneste (modern Palestrina) is an ancient Latin city about 35 kilometres (22 miles) east of Rome. In 354 and in 338 the Romans defeated the Latins and Praeneste was punished by the loss of portions of its territory, becoming a city allied to Rome. As such, it furnished contingents to the Roman army, and Roman exiles were permitted to live at Praeneste, which grew prosperous.
Lake Thrasymene (Trasimeno) is in Perugia, about 130 kilometres (85 miles) north of Rome. The Battle of Lake Thrasymene (217 BCE) was a major battle in the Second Punic War between the Romans and the Carthaginians. The Carthaginians under Hannibal defeated the Romans under the consul Gaius Flaminius. Hannibal’s victory over the Roman army at Lake Thrasymene remains, in terms of the number of men involved, the largest ambush in military history. In the prelude to the battle, Hannibal also achieved the earliest known example of a strategic turning movement, in which an attacker’s forces reach the rear of a defender’s forces, separating the defenders from their principal defensive positions and threatening to place them in a isolated pocket. The defenders must then abandon these positions.
The Roman historian Livy describes the Great Asylum in the following words: ‘The city’s defensive works kept expanding to incorporate one location after another, since they fortified the town with an eye on future population rather than the existing numbers. Then, lest large parts of the city remain empty, they had recourse to an old tactic used by city founders for increasing population: they attract outsiders of obscure and humble origin who they then claim are native to the land. To this end, they designated a location (now an enclosure between the two groves as you ascend the Capitoline) as an asylum; a crowd of commoners, both free and enslaved, poured in from the neighboring territories, eager for new conditions. This was the first step towards the strength Romulus envisioned for Rome.’ Livy, History 1.8.4-6
see also
See the full text of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome (some ballads describing significant events in Roman history, including the Battle of Regillus).
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