Gleanings from the History of Music Author:Joseph Bird Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER IV. OF THE MUSIC OF ANCIENT ROME. Who has not heard of Rome and the Romans ? Who has not gloried in her glory, and dwelt lightly upon her shame ? A... more »nd who, too, is not now beginning to see that her miscalled glory was built upon a base of hellish crime, and carried up to its summit by alternate layers of wars, robberies, sacked cities, and murdered women and children, and was cemented by the misery endured by the friends and relatives of the millions of men whose blood was the sacrifice to it ? The time will come when the eyes of the people will be opened ; and then this glory will crumble like ashes, and the whole structure fall into a mass of shame and disgrace, compared with which the rubbish of the tower of Babel will be but a molehill. A glory built of sacked and burned cities, a glory of rapine, of carnage and pillage,—when, O, when, will the world scorn, nay, loathe, such glory ? Shame that it is not a byword, a stench in the nostrils ! Glory, Hero ! — for thousands of years they should have been called Rapine, Devil. Rome, — blighting, murdering, robbing Rome, — would that her deeds could be seen in their true light! Not only for the sake of truth, but because not until our youth are taught to see her deeds in their naked truth can we hope that the same glory shall not be that which they will strive for. Look at our war with Mexico, and then look to our classical books for the cause of it. Not an officer could have been forced into that war, were it not for the false glory and false shame which he had learned in his school-books, and not a soldier would have gone if he had not been wanted to stand up and be shot at for the glory of the officers. So much we must say of the glory of Rome ; now let us turn to her music. At first the Romans had none of their ow...« less