Roman Filks!

For all of you Latin lovers and legionary-wannabes, click on over and sing some Legio XX Songs! These aren’t from Roman reenactors, btw, but rather from Roman LARPers.

Possibly the best song is a rewrite of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”:

My family’s patrician, we’re descended from a deity
With pietas and dignitas, but never spontaneity
We clap politely at the games when gladiators spear their foes
And when we write a speech it always sounds like one of Cicero’s

Fittingly, we also have math/linguistics/filk guy Kevin Wald’s oldie-but-goodie:

I am the very model of a heroine barbarian;
Through Herculean efforts, I’ve become humanitarian.
I ride throughout the hinterland — at least that’s what they call it in
Those sissy towns like Athens (I, myself, am Amphipolitan).
I travel with a poet who is perky and parthenian
And scribbles her hexameters in Linear Mycenean

However, this otherwise excellent site features an unaccountable absence of Kipling’s quite wonderful marching song from Puck of Pook’s Hill, “Rimini”:

And I’ve tramped Britain, and I’ve tramped Gaul,
And the Pontic shore where the snow-flakes fall
As white as the neck of Lalage—
(As cold as the heart of Lalage!)
And I’ve lost Britain, and I’ve lost Gaul,
And I’ve lost Rome and, worst of all,
I’ve lost Lalage!

But Suetonius is the guy who kindly preserved real Legion marching songs for us. Read his Lives of the Twelve Caesars for that and many other fun scurrilous tabloid details.