I guess he’s sorta like the coxswain of the galley slaves.
Also, in the silent version of “Ben-Hur,” it looks as though the drummer looks to the left with one beat, then looks to the right with the next, and so on. Anyone else notice this???
Hortator
I believe he was called a slave driver. I can’t find a clear cite, but many of the pages I’ve googled up suggest this.
In the novel Ben-Hur he is called the hortator a Latin word meaning “one who encourages.” In Latin he is also called a portisculus, which originally referred to the hammer used by him or pausarius meaning something like “he who calls the pauses.” In Greek he was called keleustes
http://www.ku.edu/history/index/europe/ancient_rome/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Portisculus.html
And I believe the word “exhort” is derived from the Latin word.
“to urge strongly”
In my office she’s called the metrics analyst.
…and the HORTATOR says that he has good news and bad news. The good news is that the Emporer is sleeping and that there will be a very slow cadence for a few hours. The bad news, when the Emporer awakens, he wants to water ski…
Executive Assistant in charge of Human Resources and Morale
“Ringo-Wannabe”
Since this thread started out with a Ben Hur reference, it should probably be noted that the Romans did not actually use slaves* to power their quinqueremes. The practice of using chained slaves for propulsion does not seem to have become widespread until around 1500 (possibly a little before). Of course, Lew Wallace was writing exciting fiction with a moral, not history, so we have now had about 100 years of people accepting the notion of galley slaves one and a half millenia before they appeared.
*From the perspective that nearly the entire labor and artisan class of people in Rome tended to be slaves, many of the oarsmen may have been slaves, but there was no practice of chaining criminals and prisoners of war to the ship and putting oars in their hands.
The role of the drummer is to make sure all the slaves are in sync because if they go out of sync the ship will turn if one side is underperforming. And uneven rowing will create less power to drag the ship forward. So music encourages the brain to become in sync hence there motions.
Dwarfish creatures captured when cities were conquered were often conscripted for this duty. They became known as Metro-Gnomes.
You know, they make the skins for those drums from the hides of people like you.
Welcome to the board. Just to let you know that you revived a 15-year old thread.
The beat goes on, the beat goes on
Drums keep pounding a rhythm to the brain
La de da de de, la de da de da.
You don’t want to know what happens when the beat stops.
What happens when you turn it around?
Hortator Beats a Who.
Ignorance fought. Ignorance defeated!
It’s not nearly as bad as when you turn it upside down.