 | NO. II.
A ROMAN CHARIOT RACE.
BY M. T. CICERO. Sporting scenes and sundry sketches |  |
PSALMODIC SERVICE.
Air—“Nonne vides!”
The youthful charioteers with beating heart
Rush to the race; and panting scarcely bear
Th' extremes of feverish hope, and chilling fear;
Stoop to the reins, and lash with all their force;
The flying chariot kindling in its course.
And now alow and now aloft they fly,
As borne thro' air, and seem to touch the sky;
No stop; no stay; but clouds of dust arise
Spurned and cast backward on the followers' eyes;
The hindmost blows the foam upon the first.
Such is the love of praise, and honorable thirst.”
The Lupercal was past. The solemn priests, with vestals
bearing torches—fed from the flame that burned young
Romulus a king, swift rushing from a lupine mother—
majestic, paced the stones of Rome, that sang beneath their
glad retiracy, and, thirsty, sought the secret places of their
temples. “We've had enough of such revivals,” now quoth
youthful Curtius, descendant he direct—so his blood showed
forth, rich swelling in his neck veins—from him who leaped
his horse into that horrid gulf to save his country, filling the
gaping ditch, not with his body juvenile, but with his glowing
soul. Deep from his mother's breast, and pure, he sucked the
essence of the noble soul of daring Scævola. Mutius she called
him, as she staunched the crimson glory of his severed arm, the
hand cut off to throw into the teeth of a besieger of the walls
that held his Love.
Mount Palatine, Tarpeian Hill, Curia Hostilia, Esquiline
Place, Aventine Row, Viminal Square, and all the other building
lots laid out for private use at public expense, from Battery
to Tauri Caput, exjected their eye-rubbing sun-rivals.
into foam, so that he might see the race, and hold back
Sol at least two heats, and then have time to cool an easy jog
by nightfall, and light fierce Peleus down to the barnacled bedchamber
of expecting Thetis.
“Forum boarium”—Fly-market,—“Forum piscarium”—
Catharine-slip,—all punctured mutton, and flounders fast decaying—smiling
in death, like Patience on a monument, in
hope long lingering, for a Five-point bidder—threw out their
tainted stock, and in the dock most merciful, full fed the doubtful
eels. No proud Basilica contained a solitary dandy, in a
new coat unpaid for, strutting. No safe Comitium, with
threatened vengeance of “contempt of court,” held a pert lawyer,
boring the sick Subsellia. No Rostrum breasted out the
figure-head of orators. No bullock died, no dove was sacrificed
with riteful ceremonies. The fanes, altars, temples all,
and theatres were silent. The sacred groves let loose their
grasshoppers. Glad pedagogues discharged their scholars alphabetic,
and horse-hide flogged, in extacies, preferred to joy
of human flesh-cuts. Plebeians, patrons, orators, patricians,
knights, poets, freedmen, loafers, and logicians, homeborn,
Gallician, British slaves, and Afric—the city Prætor, the newly
appointed sub-treasury Quæstor, the tribunes of “the people”—office
seekers—and of the seven-hilled tyrant every
scrub shoemaker was afoot, and for the stadium panting. It
was a race-day, and notes were not protested. Every body
rose before daylight to be happy. Two capiases only were
issued to the Sheriff during twenty-four hours. Both of these,
however, were in actions on the case for felonious insinuation
by German liberti in paying bills of a fraudulent banking incorporation,
which Cataline had dinnered and suppered and drunk
through the Senate—for the amount of their by-bets as to who
rather be a bale of cotton, and walked over by all the niggers
in Louisiana, than to be handled and footed as they were after
the go was done—
“On sharp-cuf rails their ragged corduroy sat,
The conscious chesnut smoking with their fat.”
The ladies' stand was gemmed with pearls and brilliants,
early. Brightly Metella sparkled, lip-love full. Gently, with
languid goodness, fainting, repulsing, seemingly, with half-forgiving,
half-inviting eye-lashes, that fanned the air into a
poisonous deliciousness of agony, as it blew death of Love,
and love of Death, upon the unaccustomed eye-ball of the long-locked,
yellow-curled Ascanius in the next box—who dared
to bet a pair of gloves against her—sat, shone, killed—O!
sweetest murder!—the terrible Lueretia;—omnipotent in
Beauty, cruel Victress! gentle Tyrant! merciless happiness!
wearing Grief in one pitying ear, Heaven haughty in the
other!—rings—rings—Lorenzo;—everlasting circles of mad
idolatry, half hidden by careless tresses;—no other jewel
showing but a breast-bound ruby, that swelled out upon her
partly—by accident—unkerchiefed bosom, in the excitement
of the race;—nothing much—a strawberry—a rosebud. Proud
was the eye that on her bust might look and blench not. He
might gaze into the sun by summer noonday—Eagle challenger.
Such was a Roman's daughter—Woman and Goddess
mixed. Is the blood all lost? Are there no Deities
whom we of modern years may love and worship too. Is it
all—[3]
The eternal city gasped with hot anxiety. Not a newspaper
was published on that morn, except the “Bona Dea Ob
club laureate, was in the mouths of all, excluding thoughts of
trade in sugar and tobacco.[4] The laticlavium ruffled its broad
The Plebs communis, and the Turba sine nomine of sleepers
under stoops, communed with senators and knights, and eased
nobility of quickly bagged sestertia, by honest thimble-riggery.
Jove! how full the air and roads were! Bacchus turned out
his tigers before a pearl-silvered wagonett, built by Opifex &
Co., out of a monster oyster-shell, fresh captured from the
Lucrine lake. Not a horse was left in Rome. The lady
Abbess of the Convent of the Delphic oracle, drove, four-in-hand,
a team of wild-cats. Mercury lit upon an oak that over-looked
the course. Iris got up a shower and sat upon a rainbow.
Vulcan smuggled himself inside the track, under pretence
that he was a blacksmith, sent to shoe a colt who had
lost his slipper. Mars was seen fighting an Irishman, who
had got drunk on bad liquor. Ceres stretched up her auburn
flowing tresses in a neighboring corn-field on the hill-side.
Pan was pointing out the nags to her. All—aye, all—were
there; Gods, Mortals, and Infernals. Happy, happy Rome!
sole city worthy of such glorious company!
Pindar, the best poet in the world—whom Horace calls “inimitable”
—wrote his poems in praise of swift horses, and victorious riders. Hiero
was a king, and a gentleman, but he was not too proud to ride his own
matches. The first Olympic is addressed to him as a horseback-man, the
second to him as a charioteer. Quinctilian goes the craziest nonsense about
the Poet's Union—Olympic—Beacon—Pythian—Camden—Nemean—and
Trenton—Isthmian—course outpourings. Some of them are fair, that's a
fact. But I can't find the time set down in a single report. Time, or no
time, however, it would make some of our nags grit their teeth, to read the
odes in the original Greek.
One principal reason why our turf is so quiet, so deathlike, is that the
club dont elect a poet laureate, and people are ashamed, or dare not, mount
their own steeds.—The only exceptions are in the cases of an English
steeple-chase, and an Irish fox-hunt.—Let somebody come out with something
in the style of
“Quadrupedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum”
horses onward, as though Burns' witches were after them. Then, then we
might be able to come home and say
“There was mounting 'mong boys of the Netherby clan
Fosters, Fenwicks, and Musgraves, they rode and they ran;”
reined back his curving charger, before the admiring ladies, up to taw,
in front of the Judges' Stand. Now, instead of a chivalrous knight willing
to do to death for the cross that hangs upon his ladye-love's forehead, we
look upon the ghastly face of some pale boy, consumptive, blanket-sweated,
to bring him down to weight; or upon the black eye-very, and the white ivory
of an Abyssinian baboon licked into the shape of humanity, and pivotted
with tiny feet upon the back of a steed who neighs for a master. What
pretty execution would that babe do against helmet, cuirass and slashing
battle-axe! Knighthood! horsemanship! Bring up your horses! That's
a good cry, and enables one to say a thing or two in favor of modern racing.
It sounds like that “Quadrupedante” sentence I just now quoted from Virgil.
I heard it when Eclipse lost the first heat, and a man mounted him.
I knew that Purdy would win. I saw his eye. It was like a conqueror's.
I saw his seat. It was firm as Roman cement ten years old. He was
glued to the saddle. He was part of the horse. I saw a centaur that
once. His legs added two ribs to the glorious steed, but were adopted and
formed a happy strengthening plaster to the whole family circle. His left
hand felt the bit, and Eclipse looked back. His eyes, at a glance, told him
there was no mistake about that feel. Then there walked up to the starting
post, a dignified, fleet, and certain nag, as ever retrieved begun defeat,
bearing upon his back one whom we might have wished to have lived in
Pindar's time, but for the hope he will yet contrive to bring the Sun and
Moon together, get up a new Eclipse, and ride a triumph again.—Printcr's
Asmodeus.
| NO. II.
A ROMAN CHARIOT RACE.
BY M. T. CICERO. Sporting scenes and sundry sketches | |