Answer: You won’t believe how much. Keep reading to find out.
The contemporary American choral composer/arranger Daniel Morel has set to music a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow about an African king named Jugurtha who was captured during (what else?) the Jugurthine Wars with Rome in the first century B.C. The king was brought back to Rome to be paraded in chains as a spoil of war by the Roman general who had defeated him. He then was taken to the Tullianum, a dungeon in Rome, and left to starve to death. I have no contemporary descriptions of Jugurtha as he lived out his last miserable days, but I was reminded of a scene in a historical novel about another captured king, the Gallic leader Vercingetorix, as he sits underground awaiting his own fate:
I moved the lamp so that I could see him. He shivered and trembled. He hid his face in his hands. Insects and glistening slugs crept amid the strands of his matted, filthy hair. A rat skittered between us. (from The Triumph of Caesar by Steven Saylor, accessed via Amazon)
When contemporary composer John Muehleisen set Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life” to music, he knew that the poet was not talking about actual weeping numbers in the first line, perhaps a number 7 with tears dripping from the end of the top bar. No. Here the word “number” means a piece, selection, or verse. When we refer to the songs in a Broadway show, for instance, we often call them “number,.” as in “a showstopping song-and-dance number.” Therefore, if we piece together the title, “A Psalm of Life,” the subtitle, “What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist,” and the first two lines (“Tell me not in mournful numbers/Life is but an empty dream”), we get a message of hope, optimism, and action. 