No More Learning

Castilian literature will furnish us with another parallel case.
Mariana, the classical historian of Spain, tells the story of the
ill-starred marriage which the King Don Alonso brought about
between the heirs of Carrion and the two daughters of the Cid.
The Cid bestowed a princely dower on the sons-in-law. But the
young men were base and proud, cowardly and cruel. They were
tried in danger, and found wanting. They fled before the Moors,
and once, when a lion broke out of his den, they ran and crouched
in an unseemly hiding-place. They knew that they were despised,
and took counsel how they might be avenged. They parted from
their father-in-law with many signs of love, and set forth on a
journey with Dona Elvira and Dona Sol. In a solitary place the
bridegrooms seized their brides, stripped them, scourged them,
and departed, leaving them for dead. But one of the House of
Bivar, suspecting foul play, had followed the travellers in
disguise. The ladies were brought back safe to the house of their
father. Complaint was made to the king. It was adjudged by the
Cortes that the dower given by the Cid should be returned, and
that the heirs of Carrion together with one of their kindred
should do battle against three knights of the party of the Cid.
The guilty youths would have declined the combat; but all their
shifts were in vain. They were vanquished in the lists, and
forever disgraced, while their injured wives were sought in
marriage by great princes.
Some Spanish writers have labored to show, by an examination of
dates and circumstances, that this story is untrue. Such
confutation was surely not needed; for the narrative is on the
face of it a romance. How it found its way into Mariana's history
is quite clear. He acknowledges his obligations to the ancient
chronicles; and had doubtless before him the Cronica del famoso
Cavallero Cid Ruy Diez Campeador, which had been printed as early
as the year 1552. He little suspected that all the most striking
passages in this chronicle were copied from a poem of the twelfth
century,--a poem of which the language and versification had long
been obsolete, but which glowed with no common portion of the
fire of the Iliad. Yet such is the fact. More than a century and
a half after the death of Mariana, this venerable ballad, of
which one imperfect copy on parchment, four hundred years old,
had been preserved at Bivar, was for the first time printed. Then
it was found that every interesting circumstance of the story of
the heirs of Carrion was derived by the eloquent Jesuit from a
song of which he had never heard, and which was composed by a
minstrel whose very name had been long forgotten.

Such, or nearly such, appears to have been the process by which
the lost ballad-poetry of Rome was transformed into history. To
reverse that process, to transform some portions of early Roman
history back into the poetry out of which they were made, is the
object of this work.

In the following poems the author speaks, not in his own person,
but in the persons of ancient minstrels who know only what Roman
citizen, born three or four hundred years before the Christian
era, may be supposed to have known, and who are in no wise above
the passions and prejudices of their age and nation. To these
imaginary poets must be ascribed some blunders which are so
obvious that is unnecessary to point them out. The real blunder
would have been to represent these old poets as deeply versed in
general history, and studious of chronological accuracy. To them
must also be attributed the illiberal sneers at the Greeks, the
furious party spirit, the contempt for the arts of peace, the
love of war for its own sake, the ungenerous exultation over the
vanquished, which the reader will sometimes observe. To portray a
Roman of the age of Camillus or Curius as superior to national
antipathies, as mourning over the devastation and slaughter by
which empire and triumphs were to be won, as looking on human
suffering with the sympathy of Howard, or as treating conquered
enemies with the delicacy of the Black Prince, would be to
violate all dramatic propriety. The old Romans had some great
virtues, fortitude, temperance, veracity, spirit to resist
oppression, respect for legitimate authority, fidelity in the
observing of contracts, disinterestedness, ardent patriotism; but
Christian charity and chivalrous generosity were alike unknown to
them.