United States or Uruguay ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
'Excudent alii, let them say, 'for Europe, Letters and Art; tu regere argento populos, Morgane, memento, let America rule the world by Syndicates and Trusts! For such is her true destiny; and that she conceives it to be such, is evidenced by the determination with which she has suppressed all irrelevant activities. Every kind of disinterested intellectual operation she has severely repudiated.
"Horace, Carm. 'Tis not his profession to know either how to hunt or to dance well; "Orabunt causas alii, coelique meatus Describent radio, et fulgentia sidera dicent; Hic regere imperio populos sciat."
Rhenus, Rhaeticarum Alpium inaccesso ac praecipiti vertice ortus, modico flexu in occidentem versus, septentrionali Oceano miscetur. Danubius, molli et clementer edito montis Abnobae jugo effusus, plures populos adit, donec in Ponticum mare sex meatibus erumpat: septimum os paludibus hauritur.
“Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento.” This was the special boast, as the poet considered it, of the Roman; a boast as high in its own line as that other boast, proper to the Greek nation, of literary pre-eminence, of exuberance of thought, and of skill and refinement in expressing it. What an empire is in political history, such is a University in the sphere of philosophy and research.
And as Virgil in his fourth Georgic of the bees, perpetually raises the lowness of his subject by the loftiness of his words, and ennobles it by comparisons drawn from empires and from monarchs "Admiranda tibi levium spectacula rerum, Magnanimosque duces, totiusque ordine gentis Mores et studia, et populos, et praelia dicam;" and again
The dispossession of the Red Indian by America, of the Maori by New Zealand, is almost within living memory. But in national legends this universal process is sophisticated. Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento, the Æneid told the all-invading Roman, putting of course the contemporary ideal backwards as all missons are put and into the prophetic mouth of Jove:
A. 44: nihil metus in vultu, i.e., nothing to inspire fear in his countenance. For ob, cf. Ann. 1, 79: ob moderandas Tiberis exundationes. Nationis gentis. Gens is often used by T. as a synonym with natio. But in antithesis, gens is the whole, of which nationes or populi are the parts, e.g. G. 4: populos gentem; Sec. 14: nationes genti.
The character which Virgil has ascribed to his countrymen might have been claimed by the grave and haughty chiefs, who surrounded the throne of Ferdinand the Catholic, and of his immediate successors. That majestic art, "regere imperio populos," was not better understood by the Romans in the proudest days of their republic, than by Gonsalvo and Ximenes, Cortes and Alva.
And as I wish to show simply the triumph of Pagan genius in the realm of art, and most of the immortal creations of the great artists were transported to Rome, and adorned Rome, it is within my province to go where they were originally found. "Tu, regere imperio populos, Romane, memento! Hae tibi erunt artes."
Word Of The Day