Macaulay and his lessons

The glittering ranks of the armies of the Etruscan city states, Lars Porsenna at their head, stand at the Tiber. Before them lies the narrow way across the bridge to the river gate and into Rome, defiant in its overthrow of Tarquinius Superbus and the king's drab replacement with Republic men.

With the Etruscans are some Romans loyal to Etruscan civilisation and its superior culture, but party to that culture's corruption, in Rome, by self interest and cruelty (symbolized in Lucretia's rape), that has caused the Roman revolt.

The Etruscan forces, gorgeous in their person, culture and achievement, incredulous that they should be called upon to fight, will not be put to flight, nor defeated in a set-piece battle; although their hero, when at last he deigns to step forward across the corpses of lesser men, will be struck down by the power of Horatio's desperation to assert the New Order and impede its distruction by such superiors.

Just as Horatio's fully-armoured survival in the Tiber was applauded by Porsenna as he staggers from the water, so they will accede to the republican's drab demands for recognition of what has been wrong in Rome. And from this fatal courtesy the republicans will spread outwards, assimilating, rewarding fawning (or even acquiesence), punishing with death, torture, exile, exclusion, any local and individual resistance - too little and too late.

For the moment was to force the bridge before it was hacked away, but the Etruscans were taken by the spectacle of individual combat and its rules, when there should have been all the powers of their civilisation and its laws, expressed in their presence and their strength, used against the usurpers of proper rule and the city of Rome.

There's not a lot of time left for us, either.