Letters & Poems 1 part 3/7

Meanwhile, while you weave a fleet along the double shore, on the inner and the upper sea, every forest falls into the water for you, and — too long cut back on either side of the Apennine, and rich in ship-timber — you send no less of the groves into the deep than of the waters. Though Gaul be wearied by continual tributes, she desires to please by this reckoning, nor feels the burdens which she proves to be of profit: not with so great ships did the greater son of Atreus cover the Carpathian sea, when the Doric foe, about to snatch the wealth of Sigeum, shut up Rhoetean Pergama; nor was so great the fleet of Xerxes, about to join Sestos to Abydos, when he strewed the swelling waves, and put the sea beneath a bridge, when he burst upon the pools with proud, profaning step, and the crowded squadrons pranced over the Hellespontine deep.

Nor so did the Mareotic fleet hide the Actian waters in the Leucadian harbour, when to the husband's wars came from Pharian Canopus the dowered throng: when fierce Cleopatra, girt with her ancestral sistrum, and having laden her tawny keels with pitch-black soldiery, pressed the far-spread Doris with Ptolemaic treasure. You fight not with this array, but after the manner of the ancients, richer rather in iron, to which gold, the merit of the wealthy sluggard, rightly lies subject: scorn not such rebels, and, if not battle-lines, yet these things adorn triumphs. Nor shall it irk me to have recalled the Lagean stock as an example of an enemy like yours: for I augur a like fortune to the same realms, since the luxury in that quarter is equal, nor is the Caesar worse in this. At once you assail what no Augustus in our time could.

You snatch to arms the rigid host of the sevenfold Ister; for whatever the languid pole brings forth beneath the Sithonian hinge, whatever the bear travails under Parrhasis, all this dreads your standards: the Bastarna, the Suevian, the Pannonian, the Neurian, the Hun, the Getan, the Dacian, the Alan, the Bellonothus, the Rugian, the Burgundian, the Vesian, the Alites, the Bisaltan, the Ostrogoth, the Procustes, the Sarmatian, the Moschian — after your eagles they came; for you the whole Caucasus fights, and the Tanaitic drinker of the Scythian wave. What can a man's fortune do? Whatever hands it threatens, at these Rome has now trembled: only under you as prince let her not fear, she thinks small things near at hand, unless she serve that man whom she dreaded while another reigned. Now you were moving your camp, and thousands thronged you with diverse standards.

One nation refuses obedience, which lately from the Ister brought back its untamed host, fiercer than usual, which lacks lords through wars, and Tuldila, with a haughty people, supplies to the battles a wrath that must be punished. Here you, having scarcely laid down your arms, again take up arms. As when the Bistonian women of the Cicones by chance fill the frosts with Ogygian revels, whether in the fields of the Strymon, or through Rhodope, or where cloudy Ismarus, on the Hyperborean crags, rolls the Hebrus into the sea: the wandering throng gives itself to sleep, and at once the wearied orgies grow still, and the flute re-echoes not at the double-mouthed blast. Scarcely is there rest: now they bind at the bridge, the inspired Dassaris whirls the thyrsus, and, bristling with the spots of the Erythraean fawn-skin, rouses the Odrysian initiates to the languid drums.

Yet you defer this punishment; but you were the author of greater bloodshed even while you spared. That more prudent hand endured it no longer for your sake, and spurned your shame on your behalf; whoever had been a rebel falls as the first victim of the war. The plunder too you divide among those whose minds had been loyal, who, terrified by the example, now serve, yet rejoice in the reward. Caesar, marching for the Pharsalian fields, checked his sudden fury with the sword; but, cutting his own limbs and compelled by the weight of his cause, he wept for those he slew. This mutiny profits your own arms: whatever you command, unless the barbarian obeys, here he falls, that the soldier may learn to fear.

Now in the season of midwinter you are first to tread with your foot the marble Alps, the crags that meet the vaulted sky, cliffs of glassy ice, and the parched clefts that threaten rain, and with a pole thrust before you steady your slippery steps. At the middle of the rock, where the throng is thickest, it had begun to grow harsh with inward frost, which on the steep hillside, hemmed within the narrowed paths, could not creep forward, rolled back upon the frozen ground. By chance one man from that column, whose wheel had ground the singing Ister, cries out: 'I would rather have swords, and the cold that comes gently from a quiet death; a numbness binds my limbs with sluggish stiffness; my body perishes, scorched as by a fire of frost; endlessly we follow the young leader who presses on to toil.'

'Whoever is bravest of all, whether king or people, but lately shut within the camp, lies in the sun or beneath a hide: we are overturning the custom of the year. What this man commands shall be law for all; never is he swayed by gifts received, and he counts it loss if he so much as fears the wrath of the season, even at the price of losses. Of what race shall I say he was born, whom even I, a Scythian, cannot endure? What infant drank the milk of a tigress beneath a Hyrcanian cliff? What land heavier than my own sky brought him forth? Behold, upon the topmost peak he musters his freezing squadrons and laughs at the cold, while alone he burns the more in spirit. When I followed the trumpets of the Northern king, the arms of the Roman prince, I had heard that the imperial court lay drowsing in unending luxury: it profits nothing that former lords went before, if this king too was brave.'

As I made ready to speak of greater things, from the crag you kindle me with bitter words: 'Whoever you are that dread the slipperiness of the sheer slope, break the skin of the hanging water, and with your chisel let the raised ice become your steps; lay aside these shameful complaints. Idleness feels the cold. Has twofold nature given me the limbs of Hylaeus? Did Pegasus aid with his wings whatever ground I cross? Do Calais and Zetes lend wings to me as I fly, whom you see already trampling the snowy ridges of the mountain? The frosts break you, the Alps break you; now let me strive to make good the ice — I will give you summer beneath the Syrtes.' Thus with your voice you rouse the columns, you lift them by example, and first you take up whatever toils you command; then all the rest of the throng obeys gladly, since the author himself serves under his own laws.

Who besides are your companions, and how great the master of the soldiery who drove your column behind you, yet not against its will? A man worthy to yield only to Sulla in the battle-line, to Fabius in genius, to Metellus in piety, to Appius in eloquence, to Fulvius in force, to Camillus in craft. If you ask how great is the man who wields the honor of the prefecture where Gaul spreads her broad frontiers — scarcely has Rome had one of like character, to whom, with the senate as witness, Ulpius had entrusted even the sword drawn against himself. He who now dictates laws to the Getae; before your judge the skin-clad enemy receives the hoarse-voiced herald. Why should I speak here of him who governs the sacred archives, who, while he holds the reins of the civil order, sustains also a soldier's cares, through whose interpretation the savage nation is bent to your terms? Why trouble to praise Peter, a man of small note —

Rash Clio, why with feeble strength do you assault a task from whose lips Caesar deigns to speak to the world, though he abound also in an eloquent quaestor? Yet this man of late, most gentle prince, when a hostage had been received, drove from the walls of our city the enemy who had been lodged in her wretched vitals. And because you came, the one hope of an exhausted state, we beg you: succor our ruins; and, as you pass by, look with favor, O conqueror, upon your own Lyons. Broken repose, after excessive toils, demands you; to whom you grant peace, restore also her spirit. A young bullock's neck, once the plough is laid aside, cleaves better afterward the clods of the solid earth: of ox, of grain, of husbandman, of citizens she has been drained; the fortune of her still standing lay hidden while she was being taken — alas, how great it was! After joys, O prince, it delights to recall the evil —

through pillagings and fire; and even if we have fallen, yet coming with all things you restore all: because we were the occasion of your triumph, the very ruin pleases us. When as victor you begin to mount the chariot, and the mural, the vallar, the civic laurel binds for you, after the manner of the ancients, the sacred locks, and captive princelings behold the golden Capitol in chains; when you paint Rome with spoils, and with rich wax portray the captured huts of Cinyphian Bocchus — I myself, before the throngs that block the way and the hoarse uproar, will go ahead, and in slender song, as now, will tell how you subdued the twin Alps, the Syrtes, the great sea, the straits, the Libyan hordes alike — yet first of all that you conquered me. That you turn your eyes hither, that with brow now serene you look again upon the wretched, gives me leave to exult.

I remember: when you were minded to spare, this was your face; a gentle graciousness gives the sign. Grant it, and so may Byrsa breathe again beneath your trophies. So may the Parthian flee the straight [arrow], and the pale Moor go in fear; so may Susa tremble, and disarmed Bactra, its quivers laid aside, stand about your tribunal. POEM VI. Preface to the Panegyric which he spoke to Avitus Augustus, his father-in-law, at Rome. While the Thracian lyre with its songs sounds forth the festal birth of arms-clashing Pallas by its Ismarian bard, and while, throughout Mopsopian Marathon, the rivers that had stood still, and the earth that had run — while the sweet-sounding murmur is struck by the strings with the plectrum, they say that the goddess approved these praises with praise: the goddess whom, in the time of the Giants' war, her armed sire brought forth from his cloven crown —

whom neither Latona bore in the Delian caves, destined to fix the wandering Cyclad with her offspring; nor she who, giving birth to Alcides on Cadmean shores, prolonged the delivery over a threefold night; nor she whose tower was drenched with rainy metal, when her son, born of gold, filled his mother. But you, when Phlegra beheld the Thunderer trembling, the sundered peak, burst open, drove forth from his crown; and when strength alone was dragging the gods into battle, without you his might was greatly confounded. As soon as your father's wisdom, his very brow, brought you forth, then did the gods conquer the more when they had you. For your sake yielded the engine, already reared by dread hands, stretched almost across the ruddy sky. Pindus, Othrys, Pholoe fell by the right hands of the Giants; and Ossa, now heavy, fell by the hand of Rhoetus.

Aegaeon Briareus is laid low, and Ephialtes and Mimas, wont to lick the northern wheels with their heels. Enceladus lay slain by the Father, Typhoeus by his brother; the one upholds the Euboean rock, the other the Sicilian. Hence Orpheus betook himself to the universal mother, and taught the strings to voice Calliope. The Muses rose up in praise of their Sister, and the goddess's devotion pleased more than her song. But if to have sung a mother's praises be to court favor, and I am not able to match the ancient lyres, here is a public father, for whom I have vowed my song — Avitus: the theme is the greater, though my Muse be the less. POEM VII. The Panegyric spoken to Avitus Augustus, his father-in-law. Phoebus, at last, having roamed the whole world to find one whom you might endure as your equal, give your lights to heaven; this man suffices for the earth —

nor let the sign-bearer now boast among the stars, whom Marmaric Atlas grinds from his summit. These are stars to him, which, as they sink, shine bright; even so Rome gleams amid adversities: for whom the fixed order from her rising was to have grown by evils, and now under a prince she shall rise, being consul. Surely, Fathers, it delights you to behold the assembled fasces, and to have entrusted the curule chair as a partner to the scepter. Believe me, you will grant chariots the more: now, two-faced Janus, twine your uncertain locks, and gird yourself with a twofold laurel. This year already gleams as the earlier of a prince, now of a consul, and out of the well-earned robes of state grow diadems. In vain now, my Muse, do you fear that the South Wind has driven forward the sails of our bark; for we have begun to run over the sea of fame — behold the star that preserves us across the blue.

By chance the Father of the gods looked down from the aether upon the lands: behold, whatsoever he beholds flourishes; to have restored the world was but to have looked upon it — his nod alone cherishes all things. And now, that the gods above might assemble, the Tegean Arcadian flies now on his soles, now on his brow; scarcely did he touch the fields, and he came all the way down from his grandsire; sea, land, and air sent forth their native gods. Brother of the Thunderer, you come first, you who are wont to cleave the green Doris with your yoked chariot, and swiftly scatter calm upon the astonished waves. Phorcus attends the dripping Nymphs; and there, Glaucus, you come to Glauce; and Proteus, most sure of seers, you were sure. In long array the gods come after: vine-crowned Liber, savage Mars, the Tirynthian.

naked Venus, fruitful Ceres, quiver-bearing Diana, weighty Juno, prudent Pallas, tower-crowned Cybele, fugitive Saturn, wandering Cynthia, the youth Phoebus, timid Pan, stiff Fauns, wanton Satyrs. There assembled also those who hold heaven by their valor: Castor by the horse, Pollux by the boxing-glove, the son of Perseus by the sickle-sword, Vulcan by the thunderbolt, Typhis by the raft, Quirinus by his lineage. Who could here sing the hall of heaven, whose very pavement is the glittering stars? Now the tranquil Father seats himself upon his golden throne; thereafter the elder gods take their places; to the rivers too it was granted to sit in that place, but with the aged: to you above all, Eridanus swelling with your flood, and Rhine broken into cups by the yellow Sicambri, and Ister ridden over by the roving squadrons of Scythia, and Nile, more famed by an unknown source.

When from afar, out of the upraised quarter of heaven, Rome dragged her sluggish steps, bearing her face bowed low with bent neck; the locks hang from her covered crown with dust, not with a helmet; her shield strikes against her weary steps, and in her spear is carried a weight, not a terror. And when first she had cast herself at the knees of the merciful Thunderer: 'I call you to witness, holy Father,' she said, 'you and that divine power, whatever I, Rome, was — overwhelmed enough by supreme fate, I envy those cast down: this cramped house cannot bear the weight of its ample roof, nor does the thunderbolt threaten the valleys.'

'What, I ask, did the Tuscan soothsayer portend for me by the twice-six vultures? Why, when you were laying the foundations of the Etruscan hill upon the ridges, casting up walls for a first-born people, was I already lofty in all things, O poor Romulus? I was safer by the sword, when in a joined whirlwind the Rutulian, the Veientine, and likewise the Auruncan and the Aequian, the Hernican and the Volscian pressed upon me; great enough I seemed even to you, while a woman burst her defiled body with the steel, and you, O ravished chastity, return to a modest wound. Even when Tarquinius shut me in, walled about with his Etruscan ally — alas for the fires of Mucius! alas for the wave of Cocles! alas the grief! — where now is he who beneath me brought law to the Samnite, the Martial gulf that felled the Volscian's rear, and the dictator and exile who scattered the Senones? I would wish the life of Fabricius, the deaths of the Decii.'

'Whether thus conquering or thus conquered, restore me my beginnings. Alas, where now are the pageants, the rich triumphs, and the poor consul? My spear-point terrified the Libyan pole, and I set a third yoke upon the faithless Carthaginian. The Ganges of the Indians, the Phasis of the Colchians, the Araxes of Armenia, the Gir of the Ethiopians, and the Tanais of the Getae, all trembled at my tribune. With the Teuton joined to you, O Cimbrian, once broken you submit, and I bade your hands, laden with swords, carry chains alone before them. Woe is me, what I was, when at my command commanded Sulla, Asiagenes, Curius, Paulus, Pompey — peace, kingdoms, flight, tribute, chains, poison to Tigranes, Antiochus, Pyrrhus, the Persians, Mithridates!'

'I pass over the Sauromatian and the Moschian, and the Getae wont to drink blood for milk and to steep their cups in veins, and — when they flee — the Persians who must then be fled the more. Nor is it enough to have named lands: with gleaming arms I have entered so many seas, with you as my guide, and reached nations far removed beneath the setting sun; Caesar bore my victorious standards even to the Caledonian Britons. And though he routed the Scot and the Pict with the Saxon, he sought enemies whom nature already forbade him to seek further among men; he saw you, fierce Augustus, shatter Leucas and Pharos, while the fleet-soldier smote the Actian shoals, and Antony, a drunkard fleeing through profligate years, emptied the incestuous daughter of Ptolemy from her ancestral realm. And though once I complained of the world's narrow hinge, now I am myself my own boundary.'

'Most high of the gods, I seemed to you mighty with good reason, in that Parthian terror of its own accord restored my standards, and, its tiara laid aside, wept over the funerals of the Crassi while it made amends; and now — alas the grief! — with the right of the people and the senate struck away, what I feared I have run upon: I am wholly in the prince, wholly the prince's, and I become a mangled realm out of a Caesar, I who once was a queen. The censure of Claudius followed the Capreae of Tiberius and the boots of Caius, and Nero, a man with a mournful death. With Piso you overthrow venerable Galba, O Otho, who, while you sought to be reckoned fair by the mirror, made me foul; the loathsome gluttony of Vitellius thrust a belly upon me, who, reigning a little while, perished too late; then Vespasian, famed in arms, holds me weary. Hence Titus; and after him his brother too.'

'After him tranquil Nerva scarcely began to restore me to myself, made greater than a Caesar by his adopted son. Then came the Ulpian, by whom Agrippina was dreaded by the Sicambri — brave, dutiful, upright, keen. Such a one, captive, I pray for. I know not whether any could match Trajan — unless perchance you again, O Gaul, send one to surpass him.' Tears closed the voice of her who prayed, and whatever grief remained she begged. On every side the nobles of heaven rise up — Mars, Cypris, Romulus, and the gods who are your founders, O Rome; now she herself, grown gentler, is swayed, and Saturnia grants pardon for her ancient wraths. Jupiter replies thus: 'The Fate by which all things are ruled, and by which I myself am ruled, has not been permitted to be broken; things too lofty ever labor, and Fortune has begrudged herself the exalted might that came from our bounty.'

'But, though broken, conceive great courage. If Porsenna feared you the more with the bridge undone, trembling; if the captured walls soon beheld the flight of Brennus; if in the end we drove back dread Hannibal, when, with the tumult of earth and heaven joined, his camp already stood close to your walls, and a thunderbolt ran forth in place of the Colline tower, and there nature feared her lord, who dreaded, after Phlegra, to do battle against a trembling Jupiter — lift your drooping eyes, let the mist forsake your cleared mind. It is a marvel that you should be conquered: when you begin to conquer, it will be no marvel; and that it may lie open to you by what means at last, weary, you may rise, learn from a few words, I will teach you. There is for me a land that rears her nursling from Latin blood, a soil renowned for men, to whom of old the best craftsman, nature, gave no equal lord.'

'From that city a fertile field is strong, which, scarcely cut by the first plough, thirsts for the slow seed, or, with the bullock luxuriating, lays bare its dark loam with pitch-black richness. Before it yielded that soil which the scorching South Wind baked, the Nilotic and the Libyan; and Gargara, ever compared, condemned its own dry harvests as Mygdonian. The Apulian and the Calabrian gave way: the one hope of things. Cultivating this land, O Arvernian, he yields to none in arms afoot, and whomsoever you please you overcome on horseback: let Caesar's Fortune, too greatly fearing here, be my witness, when, driven back from the hill of Gergovia, his soldiery scarcely held the camp itself. These men, so brave, I willed; but that Avitus should yield while I make ready Rome for you: for him already gleams a most ancient lineage, having embraced its stock.'

'Laden with palms it ran down through his forefathers, and — with you as witness, Philagrius — the patrician summit shines forth from his own race. But how small a portion of praise is this, to praise the fathers, whom indeed it is agreed owe their curule chairs and prefectures to the descendant? There are those through whom a posthumous origin vaunts itself, and another reckons an ancient lineage by the titles of his kin; but you alone, Avitus, are the ancestor of your own nobility. It pleases me to set forth the deeds of so great a man, and in a few words to run through his earliest life. If the noble matron had brought to birth the chaste burden of her womb, she soon gave manifest signs of the future prince, and filled the whole hall of the anxious father with a favorable augury; though the same father blamed the great destiny of his son, and already saw the reign of the boy.'

But seeing that so great a pledge, the world's deposit, was entrusted to him — that nothing of you, O Rome, might perish through him — he aided fortune with zeal: first he gave his suckling limbs to the snows, and bade the ice creep over his soles, and the little one to sport with the frost he had worn away. His rising years are shaped by the Muses, and by that Cicero with whom you thunder; he learned too the deeds of his forefathers, the leaders of old; he learned battles, and read again in books what he would wage in the field. Scarce had he first begun to be a boy out of infancy, when by chance he laid low a rabid she-wolf — she with bloody jaws, gaping with hungry maw for prey, more than for her cubs — snatched from the crag (for there were fragments near at hand); and her skull, shattered by the grinder, split apart, and the stone lodged in the wound.

Even so my own Alcides, while he wandered in the glades of Nemea, met the monster empty-handed, bearing no club, no quivers: his wrath stood trembling, and with the foe hard at hand, valor, taken off guard, took counsel of its bare arms alone. Small things indeed, yet to be told: who was readier than he to loose the taut necks of the chained Molossian hound, and to make the wild beasts lie low in their lairs by the nose's guidance — to learn to track things unseen, and to seek the very footprints in the air? Nay, if by chance the bold Umbrian had terrified the boar with his barkings, it was his sport to break the white crescents beneath its black throat, and, with wrestling arm, to drive the vast hunting-spears through the prey that faced him. How fair it was, when returning home after the chase, he glittered with the horror of the boar, and his resisting valor betrayed against his will his modesty through brave deeds!

So in the fields of chaste Tritonis, Pandion's own, Hippolytus, sweating, shone radiant from his rosy face — but at once, when the Cretan woman, blazing with twin fury, passed by her passion the mothers, and by her deceit the stepmothers. What of his zeal for the birds, which nature makes rapacious upon a well-nigh kindred rabble? Who more skilled than he taught them to join their varied quarrels through the clouds? With the winged one he conquers the birds, and by swift applause through the aether no warring talon does better service to any than his. Nor less, following civil law amid these pursuits, he is chosen — first, a youth, alone — to bind up the ills of his broken fatherland, and to demand the cutting-down of the misshapen tribute.

Then, more powerful there among the nobles, and afterward even prince, Constantius furnishes everything, fixed by so great a native gift, marveling in his few years at a great good — the words of an old man in the mouth of a pleading youth. From here it delights me, O Rome, to unfold the leader's battles and the treaties of kings. Struck by the various storms of wars, your Gaul was bidden to give the Getic king pledges of peace: among whom you come, noble hostage, Theodorus, whom for the piety of a kinsman you seek out in the midst of the skin-clad prince's court — safe, Avitus, in your good faith; and now Theuderic approves this lofty example of duty. A marvel it was, and worthy of the telling, that you, being gracious, pleased even a savage king. Hence little by little he foretastes you in his inmost senses, and wills you to be his own in spirit.

But you scorn to bear yourself as a friend rather than as a Roman: he is amazed at the refusal, and thereby you please him the more. Even so, Pyrrhus, you beheld unbending Fabricius, when the poor man fled the riches heaped upon his soul, spurning a king, while with suppliant means he begged of vile gold a pledge of friendship. Meanwhile you follow Aetius, since, often schooled by Scythian warfare, though lofty in arms, he did nothing without you, while you did very much without him. For after the Juthungi and the Norican wars, victorious over the subdued Vindelician, he freed the Belgian, whom the fierce Burgundian had pressed hard, being joined with you.

There the Herulian is beaten in the race, the Hun with javelins, the Frank in swimming, the Sauromatian with the shield, the Salian afoot, the Gelonian with the sickle; or if any bewails a wound, whose weeping is to have perished, and has furrowed his cheeks with the steel, and with a threatening face has buried the red traces of scars. Even then he is exalted with an illustrious honor, still bearing a face livid with the scaly, gleaming crests. Scarcely had he brought home from the camp arms befouled: new wars again, and a foe, doomed to perish beneath your very ancestral walls, stirs up the fight. Litorius by chance then, lofty over the subdued Armorican, was hurrying the Scythian horsemen into the Getic column across your lands, O Arvernian —

who were destroying all that lay nearest by their ranging, by flames, by iron, by savagery, by rapine, belying the empty name of peace. Then one of these, more truculent, was soon to smite with wild blows a servant of this man; he rushes on, and dying commends his grim fate to a discordant master, and carrying his coming share of vengeance to the Stygian stream in hope. And now rumor bears the crime committed to the hero guarding the towers and gates, before the gaze of the frightened commons. He is startled, he stops, he pales, he flushes, he is chill and burns, and Wrath makes for itself many faces upon one countenance, varied; or, as is often the way with one who grieves, he loves the slain man the more. At last he bursts forth, and 'Arms, arms!' he roars, and the cuirass, still greasy with blood, is brought, the spear blunted through barbarian wounds, and the toothed sword beneath ceaseless slaughters.

He encloses his calves in greaves, and sets upon his head a flashing helmet, on which a tawny cone rises high, and hurls angry light from its crest. Now he mounts his horse, and, the gates torn from their hinges, flashes forth; valor and grief and shame stand by their comrade; eager, with his lance he makes for the armed wings, seeking battle by fighting, and through the fearful column he makes good by the destruction of many what lies hidden — that he is but one. So Aeacides, challenging the Phrygian victor with Emathian spear, curbed his grief for his slain friend through so many deaths, O Troy, of yours, content now to overthrow the worthless ranks by himself, and to draw his drawn sword through vast peoples: the earth swims, drowned in blood, and while the throng blunts the heavy deadly weapon, absent Hector already falls in every wound.

When at last the man who was the cause of so great a tumult was betrayed, Avitus said: 'Come now, you who were nursed beneath the Scythian North, you who trust to blows and to your slaughter of the unarmed alone — close with an armed man: my wrath has granted you much already; I have conceded you one man, and I bid you fight.' It delights him to have slain the challenger. So he speaks, and leaps forth into the midst of the plain; nor is the fierce foe wanting to arrive. As soon as they brought breast and even face to close quarters, this one trembles with wrath, that one with fear. Now the rest of the throng is anxious with divided prayers, and through the varied blows hangs upon the outcome; but after the first, the second, and the third wheel have been driven, behold, the lofty spear pierces the bloody man, and after it the cuirass, split, yields at the borders of the back, his breast twice run through.

And while the blood gasps through the double gap, the divided wounds plucked away his wavering life. After these deeds of the hero — I call you to witness, livid Styx — the prefect ruled the laws entrusted to him inviolate: and Gaul, taking up this head for herself, weary with her wonted ruins, was pale from the Getic Ruin. Aetius, broken, achieved nothing by prayer, nothing by price, nothing by soldiery; with Litorius captured, the losses of the lands lay open; it was fixed for Theuderic's men to advance their own standards to the Rhone, nor was it needful to fight, but for the Getae to migrate. The victor, savage, charges his rabid, bitter wrath to what he felt Scythian before the walls, and nothing is heavier than that, if perchance he should ever chance to conquer, to the trembling one. After that, on every side nothing —

no garrison, and to your leaders, O Rome, nothing was left. You forge a new treaty, Avitus; your page, once read, tames the savage king; it is enough that you have commanded what the world requests. Will the nations and the peoples to come ever believe this? A Roman letter annuls what you, barbarian, conquer. Therefore he ruled the laws; for this too was fitting, that then he should become the champion of the laws who now shall be their author; lest the prince to be given to the peoples, the head, the emperor, Caesar and Augustus, should know only savage battles. Now, having at last discharged the summit of the prefecture, he had given himself to the countryside; yet never leisure, never unwarlike sloth, but zeal and care of arms even in his rest — when suddenly, with barbarism broken loose in tumult, it had poured all the North upon you, O Gaul —