Rome Drabbles: Past
Apr. 3rd, 2007 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
artyartieWritten for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
rome100, prompt "Past."
The burnished gold of his ancestors’ death masks, glistening in the torchlight, frighten the young boy. Generations of both Junii and Servilli, watching him with solemn expectation. He has learned to return their stares with a calm gaze and unquivering lip – his mother’s sharp look of disapproval when he first whimpered under the weight of his own history hit him like a blow across the cheek.
“One day, your image will join them,” his mother says, kneeling behind him, her hands on his small shoulders. Brutus imagines his own face, older and silent and stern, staring back at him.
***
The sun beat down on his back, but the young boy felt no discomfort. He was gawky, all arms and legs, his head bobbling precariously on a thin neck. His blue eyes, however, were as bright as the summer sky, a scroll clutched tight in his small hands.
While some of the Greek was unfamiliar, certain words almost burned into the page, as if from Aristotle’s own hand. Ethos, pathos, logos. The tools of rhetoric and the orator. The power of words, the very words of power. Other boys played at soldier; Marcus Cicero desired a far more important future.
rome100, prompt "Past." The burnished gold of his ancestors’ death masks, glistening in the torchlight, frighten the young boy. Generations of both Junii and Servilli, watching him with solemn expectation. He has learned to return their stares with a calm gaze and unquivering lip – his mother’s sharp look of disapproval when he first whimpered under the weight of his own history hit him like a blow across the cheek.
“One day, your image will join them,” his mother says, kneeling behind him, her hands on his small shoulders. Brutus imagines his own face, older and silent and stern, staring back at him.
***
The sun beat down on his back, but the young boy felt no discomfort. He was gawky, all arms and legs, his head bobbling precariously on a thin neck. His blue eyes, however, were as bright as the summer sky, a scroll clutched tight in his small hands.
While some of the Greek was unfamiliar, certain words almost burned into the page, as if from Aristotle’s own hand. Ethos, pathos, logos. The tools of rhetoric and the orator. The power of words, the very words of power. Other boys played at soldier; Marcus Cicero desired a far more important future.
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Date: 2007-04-08 03:43 am (UTC)That alternative history was fascinating! And it sets that part of me that isn't totally frustrated with nautical archaeology to wondering if it could work. The hulls, certainly, though it's really the ship rig (three square rigged masts with supporting fore and aft rigs) that makes reliable trans-Atlantic passage possible - but if anyone could have figured it out...it's hard to make it work given Cicero's aversion to ship but otherwise it's absolutely intruiging - and what a treatise on ship building he would write!