Classic Poem

As king in heaven the Thunderer Jove we hail.
A god on earth Augustus will be thought
By mortals, when within the empire's pale
Britons and stubborn Persians he hath brought.

Hath Crassus' soldier, of barbarian wife—
O recreant senate, age degenerate!—
Vile husband, with her folk lived out his life,
Comrade in arms of enemies of the state,

Marsian, Apulian, 'neath the king of Medes,
The holy shields forgetting, name, and gown,
And Vesta's hearth the quenchless flame that feeds,
While Jove yet stands o'er Rome's unconquered town?

Of this had Regulus a prescient sense,
When, 'gainst the foul conditions arguing,
He traced the stream of fatal consequence
That precedent on after times would bring,

If to their doom the prisoners were not left
Unpitied. ‘I on Punic shrines have seen
Our standards hung; have seen of arms bereft’
He said ‘our soldiers, ere their blood had been

‘By death-wound shed; ay, and have seen their hands
Behind free Roman backs bound fast with cord,
Seen Carthage gates wide open, and the lands
Our armies had laid waste to tilth restored.

‘Belike will he whose life with gold ye buy
A braver man return! 'Tis to the stain
Of infamy adding loss. Wool steeped in dye
Its pristine colour never will regain:

‘Nor will true valour, once dislodged by fear,
Replacement in the coward's bosom brook.
When, disentangled from thick toils, the deer
Turns on her captors, then for courage look

‘In him who hath put trust in treacherous foes;
Then with the Poeni on fresh fields will fight
The dastard who hath felt their fetters close
About his arms, and had of death affright.

‘He, knowing not where safety stood, hath all
Confused the spheres of peace and war. O shame!
O mighty Carthage, by the ignoble fall
Of Italy lifted to yet higher fame!’

The offered lips of his chaste wife, 'tis said,
And little children dear he put from him,
As one outlawed, and bowed his manly head
With eyes downcast and visage fixed and grim,

The wavering Fathers while he strove to brace
With counsel such as none e'er gave but he,
That so through sorrowing friends with eager pace
To haste that glorious exile might be free.

Full well he knew what cruel torture lay
In wait for him; yet with as calm a hand
He waved aside his kin who barred the way,
And crowd that sought his going to withstand.

As if, with weary litigation spent,
His clients' lawsuit heard, and judgement filed,
On journey to Venafrum he were bent,
Or to Tarentum, Lacedaemon's child.