MANLEY, MARY DE LA RIVIERE (c. 1663-1724), English writer, daughter of Sir Roger Manley, governor of the Channel Islands, was born on the 7th of April 1663 in Jersey. She wrote her own biography under the title of The Adventures of Rivella, or the History of the Author of the Atalantis by “Sir Charles Lovemore” (1714). According to her own account she was left an orphan at the age of sixteen, and beguiled into a mock marriage with a kinsman who deserted her basely three years afterwards. She was patronized for a short time by the duchess of Cleveland, and wrote an unsuccessful comedy, The Lost Lover (1696); in freedom of speech she equalled the most licentious writers of comedy in that generation. Her tragedy, The Royal Mischief (1696) was more successful. From 1696 Mrs Manley was a favourite member of witty and fashionable society. In 1705 appeared The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians, a satire on Sarah, duchess of Marlborough, in the guise of romance. This was probably by Mrs Manley, who, four years later, achieved her principal triumph as a writer by her Secret Memoirs ... of Several Persons of Quality (1709), a scandalous chronicle “from the New Atalantis, an island in the Mediterranean.” She was arrested in the autumn of 1709 as the author of a libellous publication, but was discharged by the court of queen’s bench on the 13th of February 1710. Mrs Manley sought in this scandalous narrative to expose the private vices of the ministers whom Swift, Bolingbroke and Harley combined to drive from office. During the keen political campaign in 1711 she wrote several pamphlets, and many numbers of the Examiner, criticizing persons and policy with equal vivacity. Later were published her tragedy Lucius (1717); The Power of Love, in Seven Novels (1720), and A Stage Coach Journey to Exeter (1725).
MANLIUS, the name of a Roman gens, chiefly patrician, but containing plebeian families also.
1. Marcus Manlius Capitolinus, a patrician, consul 392 B.C. According to tradition, when in 390 B.C. the besieging Gauls were attempting to scale the Capitol, he was roused by the cackling of the sacred geese, rushed to the spot and threw down the foremost assailants (Livy v. 47; Plutarch, Camillus, 27). Several years after, seeing a centurion led to prison for debt, he freed him with his own money, and even sold his estate to relieve other poor debtors, while he accused the senate of embezzling public money. He was charged with aspiring to kingly power, and condemned by the comitia, but not until the assembly had adjourned to a place without the walls, where they could no longer see the Capitol which he had saved. His house on the Capitol (the origin of his surname) was razed, and the Manlii resolved that henceforth no patrician Manlius should bear the name of Marcus. According to Mommsen, the story of the saving of the Capitol was a later invention to explain his surname, and his attempt to relieve the debtors a fiction of the times of Cinna.
Livy vi. 14-20; Plutarch, Camillus, 36; Cicero, De domo, 38.
2. Titus Manlius Imperiosus Torquatus, twice dictator (353, 349 B.C.) and three times consul (347, 344, 340). When his father, L. Manlius Imperiosus (dictator 363), was brought to trial by the tribune M. Pomponius for abusing his office of dictator, he forced Pomponius to drop the accusation by threatening his life (Livy vii. 3-5). In 360, during a war with the Gauls, he slew one of the enemy, a man of gigantic stature, in single combat, and took from him a torques (neck-ornament), whence his surname. When the Latins demanded an equal share in the government of the confederacy, Manlius vowed to kill with his own hand the first Latin he saw in the senate-house. The Latins and Campanians revolted, and Manlius, consul for the third time, marched into Campania and gained two great victories, near Vesuvius, where P. Decius Mus (q.v.), his colleague, “devoted” himself in order to gain the day, and at Trifanum. In this campaign Manlius executed his own son, who had killed an enemy in single combat, and thus disobeyed the express command of the consuls.
Livy vii. 4, 10, 27, viii. 3; Cicero, De off. iii. 31.
3. Titus Manlius Torquatus, consul 235 B.C. and 224, censor 231, dictator 208. In his first consulship he subjugated Sardinia, recently acquired from the Carthaginians, when the temple of Janus was shut for the second time in Roman history (Livy i. 19). In 216 he opposed the ransoming of the Romans taken prisoners at Cannae; and in 215 he was sent to Sardinia and defeated a Carthaginian attempt to regain possession of the island.
Livy xxiii. 34; Polybius ii. 31.