Talk:Lays of Ancient Rome

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I don't understand the need for "cover art" here. Especially when it looks like it has been made in MS Paint and uses the painting in which Vercingetorix is surrendering to Julius Caesar - an event that happened centuries after the ones Macaulay deals with in his lays. It's a book, not an album. And even if it has been recorded somehow the cover art should be such that it doesn't mislead the reader by using paintings fully out of context. Horatius' Rome was not Caesar's Rome which was not Trajan's Rome...etc.

File:Generic Thomas Babington Macaulay Lays of Ancient Rome Art Cover.jpg

Yes, "generic" "cover art". What a concept.
I hadn't noticed it was Vercingetorix, as noted above. I was merely struck by the clash between a romanticized 19th century image and a modern inappropriate font.
It is not a pleasant image, and it is irrelevant in content.
I propose that it be deleted. The article already has an authentic book cover.
Varlaam (talk) 15:44, 3 August 2010 (UTC)

Once Famous

"Once famous"? I would argue it's still quite famous. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.32.68.15 (talk) 02:28, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

Revision notes

Totally revised this article yesterday. I kept what seemed relevant and useful from the previous version, but there seemed to have been numerous attempts to belittle or dismiss the significance of the work (such as the "once-famous" remark mentioned above), and to argue that the events were mythical rather than historical. That's beside the point; the events were treated as history by the ancient historians, and they certainly took place in a historical context; i.e. the founding of Rome, Porsena's invasion, the Battle of Lake Regillus, the reign of the Decemvirs. Arguments that the persons or their legendary deeds aren't provably historical belong in the articles about those events, not in an article about Victorian poetry inspired by accounts of those events in ancient historians. Seemed to be a lot of negative POV-pushing about this book, which I attempted to remove.

Fixed a number of uncontroversial errors in spelling and grammar, including several run-on sentences. Added links to some relevant articles, such as Longman's publishing house, and John of Gaunt, and tried to explain the historical significance of Ivry and The Armada, although I didn't discuss the specific contents of the poems. Replaced a few links to former articles, and checked the chronology of Henry IV of France against his entry here.

Someone recently added the rather trivial use of the Lays in a current film to the lead paragraph, prefacing this with the extremely dismissive "[U]ntil 2013, over 99% of the American population had never heard of the collection, but in that year, the book became a MacGuffin in the science fiction movie, Oblivion." Obviously there's no source for the statistic, which was made up on the spot by the person who added it, probably in order to make a film he liked sound more literary. Assuming that the book is a "MacGuffin" in the film, I placed that much at the end in a new section devoted to the use of the Lays in popular culture; it seemed worth at least a mention, although certainly not in the lead paragraph. This section might need to be retitled, though. Since I didn't want it to be a trivia section with one item in it, I summarized the cultural significance of the work as best I could, without repeating the Churchill anecdote and Victorian recitation parts. I thought it might be worth mentioning that it was illustrated by a famous artist in the 1881 edition. "Cultural significance" might seem a bit overblown as a heading, though. P Aculeius (talk) 13:37, 27 April 2013 (UTC)

I recently made some improvements to the section on "The Armada, a fragment" which have all been undone, I believe wrongly, and I would like some impartial adjudication.

First, I changed "this poem describes the news of the Spanish Armada's arrival at Plymouth in 1588" to "this poem describes the arrival at Plymouth of the news of the Spanish Armada". The Spanish Armada never arrived at Plymouth, and Macaulay doesn't say that it did.

Second, I removed the sentence "The supposedly invincible fleet was thwarted by a combination of vigilance, tactics taking advantage of the size and lack of maneuverability of the Armada and its ships, and a series of other misfortunes" on the grounds that it was irrelevant to the poem; but it has been restored with the comment "Explanation that the Armada was defeated by the tactics described in the poem is not irrelevant." But there are no tactics described in the poem; the point about its being a fragment is that Macaulay never got on to any details about how or even if the Armada was destroyed.

Third, the fragment as Macaulay published it is largely about the beacons; it must have occurred to other readers to wonder how historical the traditional story of the beacons being lit across inland England is. So I put something along the lines of "Whether the traditional story of the beacons is historically correct, however, is much less so [ie irrelevant]." I then gave what appear to be the only reputable records of beacons at the time of the Armada. All this has been removed. chipgc86.167.99.142 (talk) 17:35, 7 January 2015 (UTC)

Whether any of the additions were an improvement is questionable. Whether the Armada "arrived" at Plymouth seems to be a matter of splitting hairs. The poem describes a ship that had encountered the Armada outrunning it to bring news to Plymouth, and the first engagement between the Armada and the English fleet was off Plymouth, so one could indeed say that it arrived there. But it's plainly incorrect to say that the poem is about the arrival of the news of the Armada arriving at Plymouth. Rather, it describes the spread of the alarm caused by the Armada's appearance from Plymouth throughout all of England.

There was no good reason to remove the sentence explaining the significance of the Spanish Armada's defeat. It was never asserted that this was the subject matter of the poem; it merely explains what the title refers to and why it might have been included in the collection. The sentence that replaced it was: "How far inland beacons were used is more a matter of tradition and indeed legend than of historical fact; there was certainly a system of coastal beacons, for instance in Hampshire where they did extend inland, and along the coast of Holderness." This is a quibble not with the poem, but with a single aspect of the traditional historical accounts upon which the poem was based. Since the whole section of the article concerning The Armada is only three sentences long, and only describes what the poem is about, it doesn't make much sense to raise questions about the accuracy of the traditional historical accounts in this article. That might make perfect sense in an article about the Spanish Armada, the beacons, or even if there were a substantial article about this one poem. But not in a very short summary of what The Armada is about and why it's in the book.

Which is the same reason why the summary sentence which had read, "The Roman ballads are preceded by brief introductions, discussing the legends from a scholarly perspective" did not require emendation to, "There is a scholarly thirty page preface discussing the probability of early Rome having had ballad poetry, and then each of the "Roman ballads" are preceded by brief introductions..." The subject of discussion was the Roman ballads, not the preface, which is of very little interest from a literary perspective. It reads like another quibble about the poems not being historically accurate, on the grounds that the Romans didn't have ballad poetry like that written by Macaulay. Which of course entirely misses the point of the work being modern literature rather than history. Perhaps that wasn't the intention of the sentence, but that's how it reads.

These changes appear to be a series of quibbles. Whether the Armada "arrived" at Plymouth. Whether the beacons were really as effective as tradition records. Whether the Romans ever wrote poetry like Macaulay. Whether 1588 or 1590 should be described as "recent" history in referring to poems written in the early nineteenth century, as opposed to merely "more recent" than classical antiquity, of 500 B.C. Whether poems written in 1824 and 1832 are "earlier" than those first published in 1842. Whether Winston Churchill's academic performance should be spelled "lackluster" or "lacklustre." Whether the same should be cited to a book about Lays of Ancient Rome or to Winston Churchill's autobiography. That's why some of these changes were reverted; they were arguments about minor points, only tangentially-related to the poems themselves, or they shifted the emphasis from relevant and important details to unimportant ones. P Aculeius (talk) 22:00, 7 January 2015 (UTC)