Cornelius Vanderbilt

Sulla provided the perfect example for future generals in how to use their army for personal haven. This style of leadership increased the emergence of a more mercenary army where the soldiers wish for enrichment left them increasingly willing to follow generals into war regardless of what they may have represented. Sulla essentially ended the days of Republican loyalty, “Rome, with the Senate at the head, could no longer command the allegiance of Romans.” Veterans that fought for Sulla…

In the late first century the author Tacitus addressed the extreme oppression imposed by the Roman empire by writing about the actions of his father-in-law, Agricola. Tacitus even used the enemies of the empire to address the growing immorality that went hand in hand with imperial rule. Tacitus used his writing as a medium of criticism towards the empire by talking about the moral values of a specific few to be contrasted against the empire as a whole. The difference between how the public…

The art of persuasion is not merely about convincing a person with logical statements. In many instances human beings are motivated by emotion. Persuasion is a cocktail of logic and emotion. Often the logic is minimal in comparison to the emotional appeal used to lure a person into a certain conclusion. Manipulation is an art form. In order to move the audience it must be colorful and, it must provoke. Mark Antony uses all vibrant colors to create is masterpiece, to convince his audience that…

In Frankenstein, Nature and science have brought a significant impact onto the characters. The progression of science combined with nature leads to a debacle. With this, there are various effects and roles shown through nature and science. Mary Shelley expresses her message about this. In her times, she was part of the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romanticist age and this led her to composing a story with nature and science competing against each other. From the struggles between the…

The Contradiction of Brutus Despite his primary goal to prevent Rome from falling into the hands of a dictator who would ruin Rome from the inside out, Brutus himself ironically acts like a totalitarian, tyrannical, despot. Even though Brutus meets up with the other patricians planning to kill Caesar because of his threat as a king, Brutus ironically acts like a king when he overrides the other’s ideas to enforce his own logic. When Cassius confronts him in the second scene, Brutus first reveals…

The use of rhythm through iambic pentameter plays an important part in understanding Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar. Much of the speech is representative of Antony’s thought process and the rhythmic variations allow the audience to connect with his train of thought. Determining the meaning of these rhythmic variations can be done by examining the iambic pentameter. For instance in Speaking Shakespeare, Patsy Rodenburg discusses the importance of counting syllables in each line to…

A roman tribune is a Roman official whose task is to protect the people against oppression (Lendering). By oppression they mean protection against any people who try and come to bring them down or to take them over and have them under their authority. In the fifth century, the republicans were controlled by aristocrats called patricians (Lendring). What this did is caused great tensions with two groups: the poor people, who had to request to a patrician judge against random decisions…

Has anyone ever wondered what a Roman tribune is? “A Roman tribune is an officer or magistrate chosen by the people, to protect them from the oppression of the patricians, or nobles and to defend their liberties against any attempts that might be made upon them by the senate or consuls” (Alchin). The leader of a tribe was known as the ‘tribunus’, which is ‘tribune’ in Latin. A tribune has ten ordinary people in it. These ten people hold a good deal of power and have the ability to dismiss any…

For some time, one of the hot issues of the day in Rome was citizenship for the Italian allies. While the Romans had previously been fairly liberal in granting different allies full citizenship, lately they had been satisfied to grant only second class, or Latin, citizenship. Unfortunately, the Italian allies were not nearly as satisfied with this and were agitating for full rights. We have already seen how this issue cost Gaius Gracchus his life. When another Roman, Marcus Livius Drusus,…

War, ashes, and devastation and the city of hopeless reconstruction. Pompeii illustrates destruction in order to show nobody is safe from danger at any time. The purpose of the telling of Pompeii is to present the world with history from a former city that was once prosperous. The thought of people having to look death in the face is a thought that would be found terrifying. People were suffocated by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and ¨For eighteen hours the ash and rock kept falling¨ (O'Connor…