Wonderful comment. Thank you. Yes, if you don’t know a little Latin, the allegory is nonexistent. It becomes simply a peculiar fable.
I thought it was important to emphasize the complacency of the people of Pedis, which is why they don’t immediately run off to Anos. They would have, but this isn’t a story about war, proper, but the lengths people go to stay in the middle.
Pedis is a kind and peaceful people, but they are moved to action only by charity, and also, it seems, only to some gain, even if the gain is simply not having to act or be accountable. They seem more frustrated with being in the middle than angry. Too late do they realize that inaction, on the larger scale, is invariably an action one way or another and that Aureum’s primitive missiles were really not that far off the mark.
The people of Aureum, on the other hand, are swinging as they are falling, swinging as they are rising, and swinging as they are thinking. Some blows hurt their cause, as they almost kill their messenger. I find this to be the nature of under represented peoples or people struggling to overcome injustice/oppression. At first, they only have strength enough to reach Pedis, the farthest from the seat of Anos and the first to suffer by invasion but of Anos, no less. Aureum gets strength enough to be seen as an uprising, eventually rising from their valley, from their crater to confront Anos, but if Anos’s empire would have resisted this rustic army, I doubt they would have made it so far.
You said,
“If you can tell who that is.”
Good point. As it is, if you don’t know Latin, you can’t really understand the allegory. The story sympathises with Pedis, but the allegory does not.
The allegory might call Pedis an ass for carrying the gift horse into Troy, among other ideas.
But how many people care, have the time, or resources to look up the words if they don’t know them? I guess, on large, that is what keeps us stagnate: The desire of man to understand, and his will to act, which might be a shameless plug for the other story about the farmer and the pearl of swine.
What does mankind really want? Do we want to imitate animals just because we resemble a mammal? Alas, we will reap what we sow (sorry, the worn phrase).
Sometimes, the details are extraneous. Here, the allegory is not necessary to understand who the ‘bad guys’ are. Just because Aureum is angry, shouldn’t make them unsympathetic. Just because Pedis is charitous (sp) and non-violent, shouldn’t make them unaccountable—they just want Aureum to stop bombing them.