United States or Saint Lucia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Yet they followed Mandonius and Indibilis, men of royal rank, who were the leaders of their mad project; you conferred the auspices and command upon the Umbrian, Atrius, and the Calenian, Albius. Deny, soldiers, that you were all concerned in this measure, or that you approved of it when taken. I shall willingly believe, when you disclaim it, that it was the folly and madness of a few.
Anxious though he must have been, very early in the morning of the following day, he sent out three skirmishing parties to reconnoitre and pursue the defeated Britons of the day before; but the last men were not out of sight when gallopers came in to Caesar from Quintus Atrius, at the camp by the shore, to report "almost all the ships dashed to pieces and cast upon the beach because neither the anchors and cables could resist the force of the gale, nor the sailors or pilots outride it, and thus the ships had dashed themselves to pieces one against another."
But they, in the first place, did not put themselves under the direction of Atrius the Umbrian, scarcely superior to a scullion, whose name even was ominous, but of Decius Jubellius, a military tribune; nor did they unite themselves with Pyrrhus, or with the Samnites or Lucanians, the enemies of the Roman people.
Scipio Africanus, reproaching his soldiers after a mutiny, finds an aggravation of their crime in the fact that one with so ill- omened a name as Atrius Umber should have seduced them, and persuaded them to take him for their leader. So strong is the conviction of men that names are powers.
Leaving as he tells us, under Quintus Atrius, ten cohorts, that is, as we may suppose, two cohorts from each of his five legions, and three hundred horse to guard the ships at anchor, and to hold the camp, hastily made between midday and midnight, in the third watch, that is between midnight and three o'clock, he started with his five legions and seventeen hundred horse, as he asserts, to seek out the enemy.
This Atrius Umber might be called 'that pleonasm of darkness; and one might say to him, in the words of Othello, 'What needs this iteration? To serve under the Gloomy was enough to darken the spirit of hope; but to serve under the Black Gloomy was really rushing upon destruction.
Word Of The Day