Letters & Poems 1 part 1/7

POEM ONE. PREFACE TO THE PANEGYRIC SPOKEN FOR ANTHEMIUS AUGUSTUS, TWICE CONSUL. When Nature set the youthful Jove above the stars, and the new god took up the ancient realms, the divinities strove to venerate their own deity, and in unequal modes the equal sages sang. Mars with blaring trumpet uttered his father's praises, and lauded the thunderbolts with thunderous sound. The Arcadian and the bow-bearer resounded with tuneful strings, the one more skilled in the cithara's beats, the other in the lyre's. And the chorus of the Muses applauded with varied melody—in songs, in reed-pipes, in thumb, in voice, in foot. But after the heaven-dwellers, the god is said to have endured even the middling songs of the demigods. Then the Dryads, matched with fauns, and the Bacchantes with satyrs, a rustic throng, poured forth their rough hill-melodies.

The pipe-playing Pans left lofty Maenalus, and after the lyre the hoarse reed-pipe pleased Jove. Among these Chiron, dancing to the sounding plectrum, wittily bent the ungainly limbs of his horse-half: the half-man earned a hearing and earned to please, though while he sang he gave forth a whinny. Thus both rich and poor tongue offered sacrifice, and then the highest victim of the vow was song. So we too, O Caesar, greatest hope of our age, after the great nobles offer our little incense, boldly singing before the learned Victor, who is wont to speak either with Phoebus's mouth or with yours. Though he be your quaestor in the eternal hall, to us he will forever be a master. Therefore let the offering of a manifold tongue worship you, prince: for you make our hearts new temples to yourself. POEM TWO.

THE PANEGYRIC WHICH SIDONIUS SPOKE AT ROME FOR ANTHEMIUS AUGUSTUS, TWICE CONSUL. Under favorable auspice and for the second time, Augustus, raise up the fasces, and, gleaming with the mass of your consular robe's metal, unfold the new year, veteran consul, and without pride let yourself be written twice in the annals; though you go with your hair crowned by the diadem, and the Tyrian cloak enclose your shoulders after the manner of your predecessors, let the beaten purple of the togas captivate you more: for it is always, from of old, a rare thing—a frequent consul. And you, O Janus, to whom the yearly laurel is owed, shake off your sloth and bind your locks with whatever foliage, and tremble not at the sudden radiance of the prince, nor believe that the elements of the world are shaken. Nature makes nothing new: this sun too comes from the east. This is he, O nobles, whom Roman valor sought from afar, and whom your love sought:

to whom the republic, like a ship conquered by storms and lacking a helmsman, brought herself, shattered, to be better steered by a worthy master, lest she fear the tempests, or you, pirate. The countryman sought you with prayer, the treaty-bound ally with assent, the camp with trumpets, the senate with applause; the tribes wrote you down with their ballots, and your colleague sent you to us, and the sovereignty to you; the votes are as many as the world can gather. I confess, we all trembled lest your pious colleague be unwilling to grant our public prayers to your wish; posterity to come will believe that, though over us all things are thus permitted to you, prince, over yourself not everything was permitted to you. You surpass the deeds of former men, Augustus Leo; for he stands above kingdoms who commands another to reign; better will your republic now be more one, which has thus been made the possession of two.

Hail, pillar of scepters, queen of the East, Rome of your own world; now that a prince has been sent to me, you are a seat of empire no longer to be venerated by the Eastern citizen alone, but more precious in that you stand forth as the mother of empire. The land of the Thracians, which bears Rhodope and Haemus, is yours—a shore fertile in heroes. Here ice receives the newborn, and the native snow hardens the soft limbs of infants straight from the mother's womb. Scarcely is anyone nourished at the breast, but, drawn from the teat, drinks rather of the horse through its wound: thus, milk abandoned, the whole nation drinks in valor; they grow a little, then play at battle with javelins; the wound-nurse supplies them these sports; the boys, fit for hunting, empty the lairs of the beasts; youth, prolonged by plunder, cultivates the law of the sword; and they are not ashamed to end their completed old age by the sword:

with such an order of life the citizens of Mars pass their days. But you, flowed around by the sea of Europe and of Asia, enjoy the tempered climate joined from both sides; for the nearby trumpet of the Chalcidic East wind gradually softens the Bistonian blasts of the North wind. Meanwhile Susa trembles at you, and the Achaemenid Persian bends his crescent tiara in suppliant homage. The Indian, his hair drenched with fragrant balsam, for your profit disarms the throat of his savage nurslings, that the curved ivory may be paid down: thus the elephant, inglorious, carries back its mutilated mouth as tribute to the Bosphorus. You stretch out a vast city with spacious walls, which nonetheless the populace makes cramped: men go forth into the deep with piers, and new land contracts the old waves.

For the dust of Dicarchean sand, transported, is solidified once the waters enter it, and the hardened mass sustains fields carried out upon the foreign flood. Thus laid out as you are, gazing on harbors on every side, walled about by the sea, the goods of all lands encircle you. Fortunate enough, having shared the triumphs of Rome. And now we complain no longer—let the division of the realm prevail: the pans of the scale agree; while you take up our weights, you have made them equal. You, a citizen from such a city, shine forth with Procopius as your father:

whose ancient lineage comes down from imperial ancestors, whom it is not granted to describe with worthy eloquence—not even if he should now rise from Avernus who by his song moved the rocks, and with tuneful fingers compelled the eared woods to run to the plectrum, when the waters of Hebrus stood still, and, the river's course bound, the astonished wave thirsted rather for his song. To him once, a young man, was entrusted the restoration of Assyrian peace: the Parthian was amazed that in his earliest years he bore not an old man's counsel; every satrap who sits beneath the king clung terrified; so had the envoy's genius bound them all; the Median fields trembled, and Babylon, dragon-born, who had not shut her gates against the enemy, then at last seemed to herself to lie too open. But after the new formula established a treaty for the parties, Procopius dictating to the Magi;

fire and water are sworn by them as god; and moreover, that the pacts might stand firm for the future, he here calls his divine ancestors to witness. The Chaldean elder, in the entrails, after the manner of pontiffs, performed the secret murmurs; the king himself, clasping the jeweled bowl, bowed low and poured the goblets upon the incense-burning altars. Hence, upon his return, the summit of doubled honor receives him: a patrician, and master too of foot and horse, he is set over the camps, where, confining the barriers of Taurus and by war's terror banishing the roving Ethiopians, he might behold the Orontes a servant with its flood pacified. His father-in-law Anthemius, prefect and consul likewise, ruled the peoples by his judgments and the year by his name. Fortune ever attends purple-clad men with the Tyrian dye; only this one thing is altered in them, that he now reigns who had been consul;

but we pass them all over. Now come you to my strains, you whose hair, worn thin by the helmet, has come to the diadem; to whom, the breastplate laid aside, the ruddy purple of Caesar is given, and the hand emptied of its sword-point is to be filled with the scepter; your cradle shone with the marks of empire, and the prescient earth, its produce transformed, promised golden ages. At your birth, they say, the rivers lingered, honey welling in their sweetened shallows, and streams of oil ran through the astonished presses while the berry hung unpressed. The field brought forth a waving crop without seed, and the vine-shoot envied the grapes born without it. Winter roses blushed red, and, scorning the cold, lilies exulted amid the mingled frosts. As often as Lucina releases such a birth, the custom of the elements yields, and by the newness of things faith in a reign to come is born;

thus nature declares that blessed gods have come; coaxing flames licked the soft hair of lingering Iulus. Astyages, doomed to be driven out by his grandson Cyrus, was terrified by a grape-cluster spread from a vine at his groin. The teeming she-wolf offered her teats to fearless Quirinus. Julius came into the light while the laurel blazed. Great Alexander, and Augustus too, are held conceived by a serpent-god; and they divided Phoebus and Jove between them: for one of them sought his father beneath the Cinyphian Syrtis, while the other rejoiced to be held Phoebus-born by the marks upon his mother, boasting the Epidaurian signs of the Paeonian serpent. Eagles have girded many, and over a sudden circuit the attendant wing played out crowns to come.

But that this man, noble lords, was summoned to the scepters, it was then given to know by fate, when at his father's hearth a cut-back vine-branch put forth shoots that were now not its own. That was the spring of empire; under the image of foliage, all things flourished upon the right hand through a withered twig. But after the infant had passed his earliest years, he crept over his father's arms: though the tight plate galled his neck, clasping it with both arms he pressed forward to the livid kisses with the crest-plumes loosened. It was the boy's game to handle with a swift hand the arrows seized from the foe, and through captured bows to force the reluctant strings back against the curving tips.

Now to whirl the quivering javelin with his tender arm, and, with a lance's weight, to shift at a leap the donned mail-chains of steel onto the back of a snorting horse; to drive the wild beasts he found and to seek those hiding in the foliage, now to enclose the caught in close-drawn nets, now to pierce them with the twisted spit; then often to be applauded with the crash of his comrades, when the gnashing beast bore the iron and the weapons went out through its pierced shoulders. Put away your titles, Pelethronian, eager boy and huntsman, son of Aeacus: though, pressing the back of your tutor set beneath you and therefore roaming the lairs in safety, you were carried rather by your steed; not better than our prince did Paean, standing over the Python, aim his darts, when, troubled with his quiver almost empty, he transfixed those numerous coils with countless shafts.

Nor less, amid all this, was it his to hear the ancient sages. What you, Thales, born of Miletus, blame in standing surety; what you, Cleobulus of Lindus, sing—'let measure be best'; all that you, Periander, ponder from Ephyra; or what you, Attic Solon, teach, well regarding life's end; what you, Bias of Priene, say—that the crowd of the wicked is the greater; what you, Pittacus, sprung from Lesbos, advise—to know the fitting time; what you, Chilon from Lacedaemon, would have—that all should know themselves. Besides, he learned the several schools, their newer doctrines: whatever Anacharsis praised in the Scythian fields, whatever Sparta accomplished through law-giving Lycurgus, whatever the throng of Cynics rolls over in the Erechthean gymnasia, imitating your comrades, Epicurus:

whatever the twofold Academy, establishing nothing as true, proclaims; whatever Cleanthes tastes with gnawed nail; whatever Pythagoras kept silent, Democritus laughed at, Heraclitus wept over; whatsoever the genius of Plato, which dwelt in the citadel, teaches in its threefold order. Or what Aristotle, dividing the parts of speech, sets as nets in his argumentative syllogisms. Whatever Anaximenes, Euclid, Archytas, Zeno, Arcesilas, Chrysippus, and Anaxagoras handed down; and the Socratic soul, living after death in the Phaedo, looking down on the vast chains upon his wasted leg, when death itself trembled at the accused, and the lictor's pale right hand bore the poison, the master untroubled. Besides, whatever the ancient age strove to set in Latin books, he was wont to run through it all:

what battle-lines and perils of the deep Mantua sported with, imitating the Smyrnaean trumpets; whatever aid of eloquence the Arpinate consul gives; the man born of a smith who spoke without end, whose tongue, though his father was scorned as base, was the more polished with eloquence; or whatever into eternity the Paduan volumes send forth on Euganean pages; with what brevity Crispus pleases, with what weight Varro, with what genius Plautus, with what thunderbolt Quintilian, with what pomp Tacitus, never to be named without praise. Him, formed by these studies, sprung of noble birth, imbued with good character, the prince—to whom the world from East to West then gave the scepter, whose marriageable and only daughter owed him purple-born grandsons—chose as son-in-law; yet not that, content in slothful luxury with his father-in-law's fortune and courting ease, he should owe nothing to his own merit:

but, the rank of count once received, he circles the banks of the Danube and the stretch of the broad frontier; he exhorts, arranges, examines, arms. Thus, under his father, Pius ruled his parent's camps, and thus Marcus while Pius lived—both destined afterward to give laws—commanded innumerable legions. Hence, on his return, every honor is given him, and as master of both services and consul he shines: the joined power of the patriciate; and with swift step he ran through the heights of private office, and, a boy, climbed the curule chair of elders, and, a young man, sat as a veteran in the honored gold. And now his parent was among the gods; but in you there was no lust for empire: the diadem, having long suffered refusal, chose a distinguished man, whom then, as he chose you in turn, you could not spurn;

to you alone Fortune conferred this honor, although the due order was demanding you, so that you might appear a prince chosen rather than one left over. After your father-in-law, you reign as Augustus; but the purple did not come to you through the bridal chamber, and your royal consort was the glory rather than the cause of your reign; for by the reins of law the republic chose not a son-in-law but a nobleman. I am deceived, unless the world approves the matter by its fourfold hinge. The West wind courts you, the East wind appoints you ruler, toward the North you make war, and toward the South you are dreaded. Yet before your colleague made you his partner, it is fitting to touch briefly on what triumphs the Illyrian shore beheld—that shore which, hewn down by the arms of Valamir, was bewailing itself deserted, by the chance fault of our own general.

Not otherwise than when Caepio, once slain, gave up the Ausonian strength, sudden ruin compelling it. The republic, about to choose a leader after Jugurtha's throat was broken, and terrified, set against the raging Cimbrian the Arpinate sutler, avenger of the Calpurnian treaties. Here, as soon as the province saw your eagles, it ceased at once to dread the enemy's dragon-standards. Straightway, subdued in war and stripped of booty, soon they themselves lie as your booty: but we pass these over as mere plunderers; I rather unroll the greater deeds of war. This war no small band prepared, nor did you, Spartacus, bound for the gladiatorial ring with your prison broken, prepare it:

but a roving throng of the Scythian region, abounding in savagery, dread, rapacious, violent, barbarous even to the barbarian peoples there, whose leader and fellow-citizen alike was Hormidac—to whom such is the soil, the walls, and the race. Where the white Tanais, driven through Hyperborean valleys, falls from a Riphaean crag, there lies, beneath the pole of the Bear, a race menacing in spirit and in limb: so their very own horror is set in the faces of the infants; the round mass rises into a narrow head; beneath the brow, sight is present in twin caverns though the eyes are absent; the light, driven into the vault of the brain, scarcely reaches the receding orbs, yet leaves them not shut: for though the arch is not spacious, they see wide spaces, and the clear pupils, in their deep wells, make up for the use of a greater light.

Then, lest the double channel grow out over the cheeks, an encircling band blunts the tender nostrils, that they may give way to the helmets. Thus a mother's love, for the sake of battles, deforms those she bears, because the stretched surface of the cheeks becomes broader when no nose is set between. The rest of the men's form is comely; their broad chests stand out, their shoulders are notable, the belly girt tight beneath. Their stature, indeed, is middling for a footman, but stands out tall if you view them as horsemen; thus they are often thought tall, if they are seated. Scarcely has the infant, leaving its mother, stood upright, when the steed offers its back; you would think the men's limbs kindred to the horse, so ever, as if fixed, the rider clings to it. Another race is carried on the back of the horn-hoofed; this one dwells there. Polished bows and darts are dear to them;

terrible and unerring their hands, and a fixed sureness of death to be dealt by their javelins, and a frenzy taught to err beneath a stroke that never errs. That nation, suddenly bursting forth and carried on wheels across the solid Ister, had come, and its wheel-track had cut the divided waters. This horde, wandering through the Dacian fields, you, sent forth, hem in, assail, overcome, enclose; and as soon as Serdica saw you, the space of your camp measured out, you press it with a siege; the city long marveled that you, stationed on the rampart, kept such discipline that the soldier went into the fields on neither licensed nor stealthy raids. Though often grain and always wine were lacking to him, discipline nonetheless was not lacking; and thus, with the foe nearby, they feared their leader the more;

so at last it came about that a man then by chance your ally, soon a traitor, turned his back to them in vain when the battle was joined: for when he now fled, wheeling his flank and baring the wings, you stood alone in the line; the band, scattered by its fleeing leader, sought you; the horseman kept seeking you as you sweated in the foot-soldier's fight; following your standards, the soldier did not feel himself deserted in the contest. Go now, hoary age of the fathers, and bring forth the praises of ancient Tullus, because with fair exhortation he lyingly concealed the wavering treaties of the fleeing Mettius. There is nothing similar here, and it does not please you that your enemy be deceived. Then the soldier conquered while he thought he would be helped; here he conquered after he learned that he was abandoned. The leader flees, you pursue; he renews the fight, you win; he is shut in, you storm; he slips away, you overwhelm;

and you set his death as the price of Sarmatian peace. Obedience is rendered; the deserter has now undergone the ordered death, and your victim fell by a foreign sword. Behold again, antiquity—contend, if you please: that fierce Hannibal, sought perchance for punishment, even if he had not the right of life, at his last end surely had the right of death; he whom the blind prison and the hook awaited, and whom the lictor watched, about to break his throat, drank down the poison, steadier than his Bebrycian host. For he who fled you, destroyed by an ordered death, perished not so much by the mouth of a victor as of a judge. Now be present, O Paean, for whom skilled curb-bits bind with laurel the hook-beaked griffins, as often as through leafy reins you turn the wing-bearing shoulders with two-colored ivy; hither turn your lyre;

it is not now the time to tell of the slain Python, nor to sound the twice-seven wounds of the children of Tantalus, whose deaths song preserves for you, and whose deaths live on in eternal verse. You too, Castalian sisters, reveal in few words by what divine power Anthemius came to us, with the treaty of a twofold realm: the peace of the world sent him, to govern its wars. Augustus Severus had, by the law of nature, increased the number of the gods; and when Oenotria soon beheld that fall, as from the crags of the airy Apennine she proceeds to the glassy halls of dark-blue Tiber, her cheeks not enclosed by a helmet, nor did a stitched ring weave her a corselet with driven hooks, but bare-headed;

instead of hair, a cluster-bearing vine-branch comes forth, binding many towns across her brow; and over her smooth shoulders and gleaming arms the hanging studs of a jeweled boss bit into the linen garments. He walks more slowly with age, and, holding his venerable limbs, he bends the vine-tressed staff toward an elm in place of a support: yet plenty follows him; wherever he draws near, he makes the path fruitful by his going, and, accompanying his step, the glad vintage bedews the imprinted footprints. Straightway she enters the cavern of the Tiberine flood. The river ran as he reclined, and a wood of tall reed, of matching hue, floated upon his green hair. The water falling from his chin gives a sound, though the beard, bristly with the reeds set beneath, much stilled the din.

From his breast he belched forth waters, and with swift gliding the now-rushing channel furrowed his wet belly; he is startled at the goddess's coming, and with slackened hands his oar and urn fall: then, as he prepared words of apology, she first said: 'I come—if it please you—to bend, through your aid, by my tears, Rome, now widowed of our chief; let her seek the regions of the dawn, and, pride laid aside, let her grant this one thing here—let her now deign to be loved the more. Instruct her what forces she should seek, and tell her in what quarter of the world she should demand a head for the prostrate world: whomever, born under my sky, she has created, in him the fortune of empire has at once broken its wheels: hence the Vandal foe presses, and every year with a numerous fleet wages war for our destruction; and, the order of fate reversed, torrid Dyrsa brings against me Caucasian furies.'

'Besides, unconquered Ricimer, on whom the public destinies look, alone scarcely repels by his own warfare the pirate roving through the countryside, who, shunning battles, plays the fugitive to his conqueror: who could endure a foe who refuses both peace and battle? For he makes no treaties with Ricimer. Hear why he hates him overmuch. That one boasts of an uncertain father, though his mother is a certain slave; now, that he may be a king's son, he trumpets his mother's adultery; then he is galled that two kingdoms call Ricimer to royalty—for by his father a Suevian, by his mother a Goth; and at once he recalls this: that in the Tartessian lands this man's grandfather Vallia laid low the Vandal squadrons and the Alans of allied warfare, and corpses covered western Calpe. Why relate the old routs, why the losses of earlier men?'

'He recalls the losses of the Agrigentine field. Thence he rages, because this man has proved himself sufficiently the grandson of that man at whose sight, Vandal, you always turned your back: for not more illustrious do you, Marcellus, return from the Sicilian fields, through whom by land and sea our arms pressed the Syracusan homes; nor you, Metellus, to whom it fell to outdo the chariot of Curtius, displaying to us the frequent elephant, when the black herd covered the white yoke-steeds with its bulk, and the triumph's pomp hid its own author. Because Noricum holds back the Ostrogoth, this man is feared; because Gaul binds the war of the Rhine, this man is a terror. Because the Vandal foe plundered me while my Alan kinsman went ravaging, this man avenged it by his own arms.'

'But still he is only one man, and cannot alone remove such great perils, but only defer them: now we have need of an armed prince who, after the manner of our forefathers, does not merely command but wages the wars himself; at whom, as he moves the standards, land or sea may tremble, so that at last, our right recovered, the Roman war-trumpets may govern the unaccustomed fleets.' That prayer the father heard, and at once assented; they go straightway to the City; he himself beholds the goddess, bows low and adores, and his horns touched her breast and bared bosom. Thence he bears the entrusted prayers, which the goddess, following, prepares to go the way: grimly she binds her loosened hair, and the towers, enclosed in a helmet, hid themselves. A laurel was her fillet; rough with enemy studs, a baldric fastens on her left the up-rising sword. Her victorious hand is thrust into the shield;

the war-born figures fill its orb—the she-wolf, Tiber, love, Mars, Ilia. A brooch catches with its biting tooth the garments receding from her breast; her menacing spear flashes, and the oak, curved with trophies, quivers, and wearies the goddess beneath its peaceful burden. Her sole stands on perpetual ground, but the binding stops at her first toes; the thumb, from the bound arch, sends forth two straps in opposite directions for the buskins, to bind the sandals fast, and, with the meeting loops of the bindings, to weave spreading chains along the legs. So, just as she was, carried through the clear upper air, she sought the warm risings of the new-born Hyperion. There is a place of ocean, nearest to the far Indians, beneath the Eastern pole, stretched toward the Nabathaean East wind, where spring is unbroken, and the ground, interrupted by no frosts, does not grow pale;

but, painted with unfading flower, the fields know no foreign frosts. The countryside breathes with roses, and fragrance is scented across the boundless fields; violet, clover, wild thyme, privet, lilies, narcissi, cassia, colocasia, marigolds, costus, malobathron, myrrh, balsam-juice, and incense the fields bring forth; and moreover, when old age presses upon it, hence the neighboring phoenix, reborn, seeks the cinnamon. Here is the house of Aurora, crusted with ruddy metal, rough-set, it displays smooth gems like berries. Diverse things ravish the eyes, and by masterly art each thing surpasses whatever you see; but all its beauty is hidden in its mistress's presence, and by the excessive redness of the gems it loses their varied fires, because she possesses them. Her combed hair poured forth saffron hues, and with bent arm the lowered comb dressed her yellow temples.

Her eyes poured forth rays, their color fiery, yet there was no burning: although the dews, caught up from shaken-off night, are wont to feign her sweat. Two girdles gird her breasts, and the bosom itself makes envy against the small nipples; the outermost part of her robe carries down purple folds to her reddening legs. So the queen sits upon her throne; in place of a scepter, a torch's shaft fills her right hand; night stands nearest the goddess, her feet already turned to flee, and behind the tribunal light, scarcely perceived, puts forth its topmost peak. Then, seeing Rome coming by a clear path, she leapt up hastily and first began with gentle words. 'Why, O head of the world,' she said, 'do you revisit my realms? Or what do you command?' She, silent a little, mingling harsh things with mild, thus began:

'I come—cease to be troubled, and tremble not overmuch—not that the curbed Araxes should flow for me beneath an imposed bridge, nor that in the ancient fashion the Indian Ganges be drunk from an Ausonian helmet; nor that a consul, exulting, should lay waste Caspian Artaxata through the quivered fields of tiger-bearing Niphates. I pray not now for the realms of Porus, nor that a battering-ram, driven by these arms, should shatter the Hydaspean Red-shores. I am not borne against Bactra, nor do I seek the Arsacid houses that join battles, nor is the watchword given in the camp against Ctesiphon: this whole region we have yielded to you—and do I not even so deserve that you guard our old age? All that lies between Euphrates and Tigris you alone have long held: it is a thing bought for me by the blood of Crassus:'

'at Carrhae I wrote out the price, nor did I remain unavenged, or did the field thus bought perish; if I lie, you proved it, Sapor, slain by Ventidius; nor does that suffice: Armenia and Pontus I gave—by what warfare they were sought, let Sulla tell you; perhaps one man is not believed: consult Lucullus. I say nothing now of all the Cyclades. Crete, won by my Metellus, serves you. I transferred the Cilicians: these Magnus once routed. To Syria I added the Isaurians, whom you now govern: these too Servilius subdued beneath our arms. I granted the ancient Aetolians and the Acheloian fields; too trusting, I handed over the Attalid testament. Epirus you retain; you know what Pyrrhus owes it. I look to your sending laws into Illyricum and the lands of the Macedonians: and you, Paulus, have your descendants.'

'The grain of Egypt I gave; once Agrippa had conquered it for me in the Leucadian straits. Judaea is held under your sway, as though you yourself had sent thither the distinguished Titus with his father. To you the Cyprian merchandise is brought; I, though poor, praise the warlike Catos; the Dorian land and the Achaean domains tremble at you, and you extend your fortunate realms to twin-sea'd Corinth: say, what Byzantine Mummius did the deed for you there? But if perchance it please to lull the old complaints, grant me Anthemius; let there be for these parts an Augustus, and for long may Leo reign; let him whom I have sought govern my domains; let her father's divine star rejoice that his daughter Euphemia is clothed in the ancestral purple. Add moreover a private alliance to the public one. Let the Augustus, as father-in-law, be blessed with Ricimer as son-in-law; they shine with nobility:'

'you have a royal maiden, and that man is royal to me; if in concord you assent to this, soon you will grant me to hope for Libya: look round upon the ancient wedding-torches—no such match is so ready to your hand. Let Greece bring forth here, if it feels no shame, the bridal-chambers of old won through peril: let Pisa, her chariots restored, raise up Oenomaus, whom, falling by his daughter's treachery, the waxen linchpin failed when the axles came loose. Let the Colchian maiden come forward, known to her husband by her crime before her sex; let Atalanta watch her pale suitors from the barrier of the circus, and gather the apples of comely Hippomenes now not for gold alone. Let Deianira, sleek from the Acheloian wrestling-ground, illumine your torches, and let the foe, pressed by panting Hercules, cherish his wearied rival with rival streams.'