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Many twin and triplet brothers have figured prominently in history, and, in fact, they seem especially favored. The instance of the Horatii and the Curatii, and their famous battle, on which hung the fate of Rome and Alba, is familiar to every one, their strength and wisdom being legendary with the Romans.
This ceremony at the Pantheon was concluded by all visitors writing their names on two albums which had been placed near Victor Emmanuel's tomb and Raphael's tomb. The commemoration in the hall of the Horatii and Curiatii in the Capitol was a great success, their Majesties, the Ministers, the members of the diplomatic body, and a distinguished assembly being present.
The nature of society will have it so that where there is troop against troop, as where our Duke of Orleans challenged Henry, king of England, a hundred against a hundred; three hundred against as many, as the Argians against the Lacedaemonians; three to three, as the Horatii against the Curiatii, the multitude on either side is considered but as one single man: the hazard, wherever there is company, being confused and mixed.
In principle, indeed, it approached the tournament, and the combat of champions representing two parties is an expression of the ancient instinct of the Latin peoples; so the Horatii and Curiatii fought for Rome and Alba so Francis the First of France offered to fight the Emperor Charles the Fifth for settlement of all quarrels between the Kingdom and the Empire and so the modern Frenchman and Italian are accustomed to settle their differences by an appeal to what they still call 'arms, for the sake of what modern society is pleased to dignify by the name of 'honour.
And not far from the mounds of the Horatii and Curiatii there is a monument, probably of the age of Trajan, with a bas-relief portrait, dedicated to the memory of one Usia Prima, a priestess of Isis; this worship, with its painful initiations and splendid ritual, being imported from Egypt in the second century.
As regards his attitude towards the credibility of early Roman history he is quite as conscious as we are of its mythical and unsound nature. He will not, for instance, decide whether the Horatii were Albans or Romans; who was the first dictator; how many tribunes there were, and the like.
"We passed the tombs of the Horatii and Curiatii, which looked much grander in the light of the torches than in the day, and, driving hastily through Albano, came upon the Campagna once more. It was still more like a desert in the night than in the day, for it was an interminable ocean, and the masses of ruins, coming darker than the rest, seemed like deserted wrecks upon its bosom.
He, the father, had discovered in Leipsic what his son had sought in vain at all the most famous Universities of Italy, and if he should succeed in one remaining step, the fame of the Ueberhells, like that of the Roman Horatii, would reach to the skies.
In some passages where the Odes flag, it seems as though material had failed him before the poem was finished, and he had filled in the gaps, not as he wished, but as he could, yet always with the same deliberate gravity of workmanship. Horatii curiosa felicitas this, one of the earliest criticisms made on the Odes, remains the phrase which most completely describes their value.
At the suggestion of one of their medicine-men they joined in a prayer to the Great Spirit for deliverance, and when again they looked about them, there stood the bridge. Their women were hurried over; then, like so many Horatii, they formed across this dizzy highway and gave battle.
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