#lucanposting

WHAT fury is this, citizens? What wantonness of iron?

To offer this Latian gore to hateful peoples

And–with proud Babylon still standing, with her trophies 

Ausonian!–to let Crassus wander, an unavenged shade.

Does it please you to wage these triumphless wars? 

Come on! How much land, how many seas could you have had? 

With all this blood that civilian right hands spilled. . . 

From where Titan comes, and the night, from where stars conceal

To where fiery midday burns its hot hours

And where winter is freezing, and doesn’t know how to cede to spring,

Where the icy cold freezes the sea with a Scythian chill

Even Seres would be under the yoke, even the barbarian Araxes,

And the people who know where the nascent Nile lies.

Only then, if you still have such a love for godcriminal wars, Rome, 

When you have the whole world under Latin laws,

Turn your hand against yourself: you’ve never lacked enemies.

But now it’s the walls and roofs hanging, half-ruined

In Italian cities, and the walls have fallen, huge

Stones fall and the houses are kept by no guard.

And the rare inhabitant wanders through antique cities,

Horrid with thornbush and unplowed for many years

Hesperia is; her fields demand hands that aren’t there.

Not even you, fierce Pyrrhus, will be the author of such great defeats,

Nor the Phoenician: no sword has happened to pierce so far within;

Wounds made by civil hands sink deep.

BUT IF the fates, for the coming of Nero(!!!) no other way 

Found, and if they purchased for such a price these eternal

Kingdoms–even the gods in heaven could not serve their Thunderer

Except after the wars with the savage giants.

Now I don’t, you gods, protest. These unspeakable godcrimes themselves

Please for such a prize. Let Pharsalia, her dire fields,

Satisfy the Phoenician, and let her be steeped with blood,

Let the last battles run together at deadly Munda.

For this, Caesar, Perusinian hungers and Mutinian labors

Came, and the fleets whom he pressed, rough

Leucas, and the servile wars under burning Etna.

Much indeed does Rome owe to these civil arms,