Legio XV Apollinaris - Epic Roman Music

Music and vocals by Farya Faraji. Please note that this isn’t reconstructed Ancient Roman music, only modern music that uses elements of Ancient Roman music as well as its instruments. With this track, I wanted to lean a little into the aesthetic of the Chromatic genera of Ancient Greco-Roman music; a family of modes whose notes are organised in such a way as to often be reminiscent of modern blues and jazz melodies to our modern ears, and whose intervals also formed the basis of many modes and scales used to this day in the Balkans and the Middle-East, with a sound we today equate more to an oriental or eastern aesthetic. The instruments used are the lyre and the aulos. I used reconstructed Classical Latin pronunciation for the lyrics. The sung melody takes into account both the phonemic vowel length of Latin, as well as the stress accent. I used Ancient Greek singing convention as I figured it would be the closest relative to whatever the Romans used: therefore the musical stress falls on the accented stress of each word, and the long vowels are demarcated from the shorter ones by being sung with melismas (more than one note on the syllable). The Legio XV Apollinaris was levied by Octavian in either 41 or 40 B.C, and survived at least up until the 3rd century A.D. The legion fought against the Marcomanni, a Germanic people, as well as the Parthians. It is almost certain, given their being stationed in the Middle-East, that they also fought against the Sasanian Persians later on. Lyrics: A sōlis ortū usque ad occāsūm, Ambulāmus, ambulāmus, ambulāmus! Mīlle Germānōs, Mīlle Persos, Semel et semel dēcollāvimus! A Barbarā*, Britanniae*, flūmina*, Ad Ītaliām*, sōlem, Semel et semel dēcollāvimus! *This phrase is somewhat tricky; the “Barbarā” is in the ablative case, and means “the female barbarian,” the “Britanniae,” is vocative and in plural, the singer adresses the many Britannias as “you,” the poetic meaning being the “two Britannias,” one under Hadrian’s wall and the other above. The “flūmina” is also in vocative, and the singers adress rivers as “you.” English translation: From sunrise to sunset, We march, we march, we march! Thousands of Germans, thousands of Persians, Again and again, we have decapitated! From the Barbarian woman, ye many Britannias, and ye rivers, To Italy and the sun, Again and again, we have decapitated!