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VÆ VICTIS
47
Vainly for even now beneath their gazeA thousand delicate spires of distant smokeReddened the disc of the sun with a stealthy haze,And the smouldering grief of a nation burst with the kindling blaze.
"O dying Carthage!" so their passion raved,"Would nought but these the conqueror's hate assuage?If these be taken, how may the land be savedWhose meat and drink was empire, age by age?"And bitter memory cursed with idle rageThe greed that coveted gold above renown,The feeble hearts that feared their heritage,The hands that cast the sea-kings' sceptre downAnd left to alien brows their famed ancestral crown.
The endless noon, the endless evening through,All other needs forgetting, great or small,They drank despair with thirst whose torment grewAs the hours died beneath that stifling pall.At last they saw the fires to blackness fallOne after one, and slowly turned them home,A little longer yet their own to callA city enslaved, and wear the bonds of Rome,With weary hearts foreboding all the woe to come.
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