Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
The chapel of Bede’s monastery in Sunderland was full of the colours and sounds of the far-off Mediterranean world.
In 678, the new Pope, a Sicilian Greek named Agatho, decided to continue a recent trend of introducing Greek elements into Roman worship. St Benedict Biscop, an English abbot who visited Rome for the fifth and final time the following year, brought the sights and sounds of the eastern Mediterranean back home.
A proud British king, taken to Rome as a trophy of Empire, refused to plead for his life.
Caratacus, King of the Catuvellauni, led the British resistance to Roman invasion in the AD 40s, but he was betrayed and taken to Rome. The Emperor Claudius asked him why his life should be spared, and this was the King’s reply.
The wise old philosopher had learnt that popular entertainments rot the soul.
Seneca knew something about cruelty: he was tutor and counsellor to the Emperor Nero. Here, he writes to Lucilius, Procurator of Sicily, about the moral effect of mass entertainments such as the brutal gladiator contests of Rome.
The Roman Emperor Honorius, so the story goes, had more on his mind than the impending sack of one of Europe’s iconic cities.
After the Roman Empire split into East and West, Constantinople’s glories in the East contrasted sharply with Rome’s growing vulnerability, and in 410, Alaric the Goth beseiged the former capital.
(That’s cat-tails, obviously.) And who ever said cats were unpredictable?
Charles Fox was a Whig politician who served briefly as Foreign Secretary. A staunch opponent of King George III, he once dressed himself in the colours of the American revolutionary army. But he was also friends with Prince George, the King’s son.