Let the man whom some duty has drawn away from your defense write down his profession amid your praises, O venerable prince, and let the consideration of his purpose hold him back from heralding it. Let the community, bound to you in its affairs, pour forth speech to you, while an unequal exchange repays in praises what it has gained from your sweat. Liberty, beholden to your arms, has learned to announce its gladness in heralding praises — the only thing it can do. It is yours, O illustrious one, to set a price upon a devotion which you understand cannot transcend the strength of your subjects. It will belong to your sacred dispensation to estimate from your servants what you may demand, in whom you recognize that all their power soldiers for you.
Let your majesty deign to receive a literary offering upon its own altars, for lest the splendor of deeds grow old, the exercises of tongues must be summoned. Lest antiquity claim for itself what you have done, let the chain of those who recount it bind it fast; for you will grant the repose of the disciplines through which eternity will befall you. The heavenly steward of the mystery demands nothing further from human talents than that they understand by what Author comes what they know. Among those nearest to God, he who has bestowed the gift of recognition has rendered a benefit. What descends from on high may be valued only at the price of hymns.
The Maker of the world is owed, for the greater gifts thence bestowed, a princely praise that should flow forth from the inner sanctuary of a heart attuned in measure; nor does the commemoration of your divine power demand only the elegance of the tongue, since it is to be asserted by the goodness of conscience. In divine homages a serene mind performs its sacrifice with its mouth at rest; fortified by the brightness of its deeds, in heavenly worship even the mute renders obedience. Therefore even the title which was thought to stand in the way invites me. Would that a purer profession might have concord with the secret things, and that the splendor of the heart might not dissent from the body. Hail now, greatest of kings, in whose lord the vigor of nobility has recognized its own savor. Hail, the standing of the commonwealth:
For it is a sacrilege to relate your deeds piecemeal, all heaped together at once, and to sort out the goods of a single span of time by the division of words. If I count the wars of my king, I find as many as triumphs. No enemy ever came to meet you in encounter except one who was added to your praises: whoever resisted your will became but a trophy for your service. For the subject ever begot glory for your piety, or whoever presumed to take up arms against your valor. He who beheld you in the battle line was overcome; he who beheld you in peace feared nothing. Nor did your venerable promise falter amid prosperity, nor did your vigor suffer delay in battles. Your road, though hemmed about with many an obstacle, both saw daily victories and brought no losses to your advance: so hemmed in by the columns of enemies that it would deny passage—
—yet thus laid open by your onset, as though the enemy's foresight could do no harm. If these things are to be ascribed to your good fortune, the dower of a prince is full; he is more august by every honor—if it be by toil. Taking up the first contests against nature with all your right hands, lest hope of resisting be left to your foes, you subdued to yourself, in a prince's place, the varied laws of heaven, the bulwarks of the lands, the arrogant swellings of the rivers. Let me be called a liar if ever heat or cold offered hindrance to your dispositions, if you were hampered by the swelling of the floods, if you were constrained by the necessity of drinking, if the ridges of the Alps, joined by the loftiness of the vaulted sky, brought any slowness to your courses. They knew not how to resist, whom you found with the defenses of their terrain overcome—
—because broken defenses make careless those whom they protect, and they live with minds slackened in idleness who have possessed the safer places. Against you neither the dwelling of the plains brought forth equals, nor did the trackless wilds, having embraced any, withdraw them from plunder, unless they came forth as suppliants. Set within your dominion, a man without dread displayed his riches; nor did it help the rebels if a man showed himself poor. No one was withdrawn from your indignation except by humility, since whoever begged advanced into the number of allies. Not unknown to you is the cold of Scythia, nor do you, as the possessor of another world, fail to know Meroe or the Crab gasping with its heats; you have learned all things by passing through them, things that scarcely lay open to our hearing.
These things indeed are greater than a man, but he who is prepared for the helm of the world must come furnished for all the cardinal points. — Too swiftly have I seized the time for mature praise, and as though a stream, even of a torrential genius, did not flag at its first beginnings, so, through hunger for narration, I have rushed upon the fruits of a perfected age. He seeks the ranks of laurels who is surpassed both by their swiftness and their number. More quickly, O most unconquered one, were the distinctions we have unfolded accomplished by you than they can be told. Who could bear sluggishness in the recounting of his own deeds, who endured none in the doing of them? III. Greece, foreseeing what was to come, reared you in the bosom of civility—
—and so educated you, as you entered the threshold of life, that while you still had the merriment of boyhood, security from your guardian soon followed it. Still you dwelt in the white blossom of adolescence, and the milky stalk had not yet borne the harvest of your virtues before its trial; still the image of approaching manhood was soft, and no down, tinging your face, clothed it: when the purple of your age and the little flower of the coming empire promised to the anxious a terror at the changing of grace—when, to the proving of your strength and clemency, fury flashed forth with its bonds broken and subjugated minds, disemboweled by long quiet, to the fodder of opportunity. Forthwith the reverence due to a prince was driven from the city, and into the empty possession a tyrant, with no blood admitting him, gained access.
He, having gained the palace, decided—after he had with terror vanquished his enemies—that nothing remained for him to do: when the light of nature, without the suffrage of years, impelled your spirit, lest either the better cause should lie subdued with you present before it, or you should fail to render in the time of necessity the benefit which you had received in peace. At the very doors of your approach the invader gave way, when the scepters were restored through you to the fugitive who doubted of his safety. Let us sift through the histories, let the annals be questioned: with whom was it established that a sovereignty was poured back to an exile, which a king by birth had purchased with his own blood? The glory of the camp is scattered by the participation of squadrons, nor can that be referred to one which has come by the contribution of many.
The fruit of singular goodness is the curbing of ambition, especially at that time when, without loss to reputation, you might retain what you had acquired. An equal praise regards you, illustrious lord, for the diadem given and the diadem defended. If the ruler of those parts loved you not, smitten he yet presided over the commonwealth; if he cherished you, he was beholden to you; you employed in the fidelity of your services a witness clad in purple. IV. Even then the very palaces betook themselves into your right; no one believed that you could not transfer to whomever you wished what you had restored. But sparing in exacting rewards, as though they sufficed for the requital of your works, you accepted the fasces—not that any genius should accrue to you from the curule chair, but that the embroidered robe should earn its price from you.
Who would believe that virtues dwell amid your intimates with such full execution of this civility? That year had a consul who guarded the commonwealth not so much by anxious care as by reputation, when, with him set among the borders of office, the arms that had been seized from the enemy trembled. When did such a one fall by the lot of the elector as was given by the proven renown of kings from the very infancy of the world? I do not wish to wander through the chances of dominion: in your lineage those are approved who are found. To Serranus the plowshares gave consular staves, who, while he committed great seeds to the furrows, found a harvest of honors springing up for him. But I love less those prosperities which take their beginning from despair.
Hardly to a few has it befallen to degenerate nobly, since to your family you owe it to guard nobly the deeds of your race. Why, O Antiquity, would you cast in my teeth rustic limbs adorned with generals' cloaks? I set against you, what may overcome admiration, my prince, so sprung that he cannot be reproached, so conducting himself as though he still entreated, amid emperors, to be admitted. V. But what shall I do, before whom there meets a fruitful crop of your deeds, where all things surpass the one who would choose? I know not which ears of grain to bring into the storehouses, which to leave behind.
There stands before my eyes the leader of the Bulgars, laid low while your right hand asserted liberty—neither slain, lest he should perish from the records, nor untouched, lest he should live to arrogance—destined to survive among an untamed people as a domestic witness to your strength. For had he received a wound sufficient for death, you would have conquered his person; in that he remained in the light, he subdued his origin. This is the nation before which was everything it wished, in which he won titles who purchased with his adversaries' blood his dignity, among whom the field is the publisher of birth—for whoever's weapons reddened more in the struggle, he was reckoned without question the more sublime—a nation which it befell no one to know as resisting before your battle, which through long ages waged its wars by mere onset.
These men neither mountain masses, nor the barrier of rivers, nor the want of denied nourishment held confined within the narrows of necessity's law, since they believe it enough for delight to drink the milk of their equine herd. Who could endure an adversary who runs and feeds by the benefit of his swift mount? What of this, that they deliberately enjoin upon those very animals the endurance of hunger, by which they have learned to avoid starvation? How does it come about that the rider of a fasting steed draws food from its very entrails, food which the horse, with care instructing it, foresaw it should not store away? Before you, the world was believed to be passable to these men; now they reckon that part of the globe alone shut off from them which you guard.
— Swiftly I pass over many things, lest by the fault of too sluggish a pen you arrive too late, lest the torch of the Roman senate-house, long forced into shadow, glow forth too tardily. VI. Between the apprenticeships of your life and the maturity of your triumphs, the favor of heaven poured into your sacred breast affection for us. Already by the loss of long quiet, through the worthlessness of those who governed, the once mighty land had grown old; already untainted peace had brought a failing to the public resources, when among us, swollen with the successes of daily plunder, an internal despoiler ran wild, who, lavish of his own, demanded that the revenues of the treasury rise not so much by taxes as by robberies. With ambition raging, the impoverished lord had contracted hatreds by his prodigality, yet, with his forces defrauded, what he diminished was not joined to the love of opulence.
For then the straitness of the court was driving private fortunes into the narrows, nor had the extinguished tinder of the tyrant allowed sparks of his retainers to flash anywhere. The army feared its parentage, whom another's honor admonished to remember its own origin; for, chilled with dread, he commanded the legions to go at his nod and return. For obedience is suspect which serves the unworthy, and as often as the consciousness of the lowest stock befits those set above, they fear this too—that they are feared. Among you was born a cause of fortunate discord, when Roman prosperity invited rebellious spirits to the slaughter of your kinsmen. From the weak a cause of contending was generated, lest even confidence should come to those about to perish from the affair. A party of the fugitives stirred up battles.
Then, with your forces summoned far and wide, one people, spread through innumerable nations, was drawn together. As the world migrated with you to Ausonia, no one undertook the journey except as a parent. Wagons were taken up in place of houses, and into these unsteady homes flowed together all things that would serve necessity. Then the arms of Ceres and the stones that loosen the grain were dragged by oxen. The mothers, laden with offspring, amid your households, forgetful of sex and of burden, labored with care to prepare sustenance. Then in the field winter, and the hair, veiled with the perpetual whiteness of the frosts, entwined the beard with icicles upon the locks it had taken. For the garment which the matron had more carefully woven, while the frost endured, was broken so as to cling to the body.
Provender for your columns either undevoted nations or the wild beast reared in its haunts supplied. VII. Among these things which yielded to you against ice or heat, I would touch upon the surface of one line of your contest. The Ulca is a river, the safeguard of the Gepids, which in place of ramparts fortifies the bold and, in the manner of ridges, embraces the flank of the province with certain walls not to be foiled by any battering-ram. To this your road's rigor brought you, where, in the spirit of resisting rather than for the sake of envoys and the petition of favor, a nation long unconquered hastened, when the necessity of famine almost besieged your cohorts before the enemy. Tell me, I beg, most merciful lord, what hope remained over besides yourself among a people to be compared to the sand or the stars?
With the Gepids pressing close, you flew across the way—a path of pestilence by the river, which a fugitive would have shunned—against bared swords drawn from their sheaths. The footsteps of none unwitting, sunk in the mire, clung fast; no one prodigal of his life ran into the danger unaware. The authority of the human mind is conquered by the foresight of peril; the conscience of the brave totters as often as things to be dreaded are thrust before the eyes. Before your untamed youth stood a sure choice concerning deaths, when no security concerning safety seemed to appear. Why did you exalt Cato, O ancient monuments, because through the Libyan Syrtes he led an army, while he made human deaths into the mockeries of serpents, or when, without the prize of valor, reared by the vapors of heaven, he experienced the cold of poison?
It befell no one to see the water-snakes before his own destruction, while through the prodigious breath and the body's fabric, as souls are wont, it flew off into the air. He is not slain with the praise of a brave man who knows not whence his fall comes. Nor is the fortitude of that soldier to be compared with your battalions, nor is the wisdom in the leader equal. Him the fury of civil war drove on; you Rome, mistress of the world, demanded for the restoration of her estate. But why do I defer what a favorable issue afforded you? They gave way to the most crowded squadrons of your enemies whom the farther bank had received. Those were urged with weapons whom neither the chasm nor the inrush held back—
—the lance, driven by stronger arms, passed through the fasting wicker-frames of their breasts, when, amid earthly shipwrecks and waves of gore, the most unconquered leader appeared, fortifying those who stood by with such an address: 'Whoever desires a path through the enemy battle line, let him follow me; let him not look to another who asks an example of fighting! Valor requires not a multitude; to the few go wars, the fruit of wars to the very many. From me shall the army be judged, and in these things which I shall do, the nation triumphs. Lift up the standards, by which it is provided that I lie not hidden; let them know whom they seek, or on whose throats they may rest! Let those who meet my encounter be ennobled by their destruction.' These words spoken, he called for a cup for the sake of an omen, and, with the reins slackened for battle, was poured forth.
As a torrent the crops, as a lion the herds, so you laid waste; nor did anyone meeting you stand fast, nor could he escape his pursuer. You were borne through all things, your weapons now failing, your wrath still growing. Forthwith the condition of the Gepids was reversed: those scattered in flight were seen, with their lot changed, as the victors. For you, venerable one, who unaccompanied had seized the first taste of the struggle, advanced hedged about with thousands. The opposing multitude was cut down, until the near night snatched away a few, while you came to the wandering granaries stuffed with the supplies of cities, which not only satisfied necessity but relieved, amid the favorable prospects of delicacies, your loathing of want. Thus adversity served your prosperity, and the hostile foray fought against the famine of your men. The hostile encounter conquered starvation—
—nor would you have returned to health, had the contests been lacking. Let these things, arranged in order out of countless deeds, suffice. I pass over the Sarmatians migrating with their garrison, and I am silent about the common throng of conflicts numbered among the trophies. VIII. With you I meet, O Odovacar, against my ruler—you who had stirred up all nations against him as though a shaker of the world. As many kings had come together with you for the wars as the general body could scarcely sustain in soldiers. It was discovered that the minds of a heaped-up multitude are diverse, and that the hope of victory comes not from number. As yet the right hands of your men tottered from the foregoing wasting, nor did the weakness of their limbs carry through their longed-for onsets—
—yet it suffices to be willing to the measure of one's strength, and resolve undivided concerning enemies brought, in place of vigor, vengeance. You were held back neither by camps fortified over long time, nor by the depths of the river: it was granted to your enemies to construct a rampart, not to guard it. Suddenly the running about of the fugitives darkened the waters, through which you enjoined upon the departing that the domestic tempest must be overcome: meanwhile your battle lines consummate the fights by their mere aspect, not by toil. There fortune opened the doors for you, manifestly revealing that those who had given way in the foremost place—the second struggles would not await them. But again the wandering mind, in its own deception, set up a conflict, while at your Verona, with noble equipment, with loosened hands, the battle was being mounted with lavish expense.
Nothing was stronger than your adversaries before the battle line, but when the trumpets sounded the war signal, nothing was weaker. Greatest was the valor in the promise of the struggle and—if the tongue could suffice for right hands—the supreme abundance of words. The site of the place was chosen, not so much useful for encounter as for fear, foreseeing lest the foremost flight and the desertion of the runaways be ascribed to chance. And yet the bright fortune of the commonwealth pressed hard, lest you should desist from your undertaking. Having measured out the intervals of your march, you beheld the fires of the enemy gleaming red after the manner of stars, so that, had dread ever been known to you, you would have learned that you hung over a precipice. Never was the state of your spirit either lifted up by the swelling of prosperity or acquiescent in doubtful things. The day of contending was at hand, about to bring darkness to many.
When first the dawn with her saffron pair announced the rising of the radiance, when from the waters of ocean the flame of the sun arose, already the bugles were sounding hoarse, already your army, forgetful of itself, sought you. While you enclosed your breast in defenses of steel, while you were armed with greaves, while the avenging sword of liberty was fitted to your side, your holy mother and venerable sister, who had come to you for love's sake, while feminine anxiety hung between hope and fear, while, astonished concerning the outcome, they fed upon the star of your countenance—these you confirmed with such addresses: 'You know, mother, known to all nations by the honor of your offspring, that at the time of my birth you, fruitful, bore a man. The day is here, on which the field may announce the sex of your son—
—it must be done with weapons, that the glories of my ancestors may not through me perish. In vain do we lean on our forefathers' titles, unless we are aided by our own. There stands before my eyes my begetter, of whom fortune never made a mockery in contest, who, his strength so requiring, won success with his own right hand for himself. With this leader one ought to strive, who feared not all uncertainties, but himself secured prosperity for himself. You, however, carry down the elaborated garments and the torments of the threads. Let the battle line receive me more adorned than festivals have been wont. Let him who has not recognized me from my charge judge me by my splendor. Let the honor of the garment invite the eyes of the eager: let the more precious appearance set forth those to be struck. Let him have the solace of his toil, to whom, O fortune, you shall have granted my throat!
Let those who shall not have chanced to see me fighting gape at the splendor of the fallen.' These words spoken, the steed received you on its back, restless with longing for the war-trumpets. But while you indulged in conversation, your legions were being pressed by hostile insistence. You gave confidence to the sluggish while you delayed, and this, I believe, by the providence of the heaven-dwellers, lest what you conquered should be owed to the multitude. Straightway the throng of the slain announced your arrival to the enemy: the enormity of the slaughter betrayed the executioner. But neither were the accustomed remedies lacking to them. At once they took up the wings which dread bestows, choosing destruction with headlong course through fear of death.
Let him who knows me not to have obeyed the truth behold the waves of the Adige made rich, in your stead, with corpses, and while you swelled the eddies with gore, in another part the rush of the streams was checked. And so, lest you should not suffice for swords, even the water served as a soldier for you. Hail, most splendid of rivers, who in great part washed away the filth of Italy, receiving the torch of the world without loss of your purity. Behold, that field, covered with armed men, shone forth most noble with the whiteness of human bones! We have something to guard, as often as we are pressed by the memory of an ancient grief. Let the sublime earth preserve a most beautiful spectacle. Let what they suffered remain as long as oblivion erases what they did. O would that it were not permitted to snatch anything away to the voracious beasts!
What the thefts of beasts shall have acquired perishes from a spectacle worthy to be desired. IX. There, O Rome, I would wish that, forgetful of your age, you might journey. If you came, trembling with tottering footsteps, the joys would exchange your span of years. Why are you ever shut up, immersed in shrines? Here it was brought about that you should have more consuls than you had before seen candidates. Acknowledge the clemency of your lord: he willed that you should drink in the savor of triumphs, but chose that you should not know the doubtful issues of contests. X. Behold, again a portion owed to death by the slaughter of enemies ran to a surrender already known to it, and although those falling had exceeded number, yet for servitude they assembled in companies equipped with radiant arms. Your spirit was bent, ever inclined to pardon—
—you trusted, that they might grow accustomed to fidelity by the schooling of necessity, which they had never shown by a will conciliating princes. It saved you, O chief of kings, that you cast away caution in the confidence of an oath. We hung in suspense, anxious lest those whom you had received from your enemies should not perish, as they deserved. Thanks to you, O God, arbiter of the world, who impelled to avenging swords consciences possessed by ancient torpor. It would shame me to recount their inborn fickleness, did I not see it ministering to your praises. Why do I dissemble to pursue their deeds? It pleased them again to promise the realms of Odovacar to one who stretched out an unarmed right hand. Forthwith, with matters caught in the light, the error of hostile minds became known.
You summoned the providence that is companion of your deeds, and lest the wantonness of those running about should go unpunished, brandishing the standards of vengeance, you made the people, already proven, partner of your counsels in secret. It befell no adversary to recognize what the better part of the world was disposing with you. Through the most disjoined regions a longed-for death was decreed. Who, save the supernal will, granted this—that by the stroke of a single moment there should be poured out a disaster of the Roman name gathered through the long wickedness of the times? Here I know not whither to turn myself. Shall I render thanks, who have undertaken the office of praiser, or shall I enter upon the journey of your panegyrics already seized? The matter is consumed by a prosperous and fatal war—
—the presumption of Odovacar was cut down, after it befell him not to be aided by deceit. Why should I commemorate the routed columns of the Heruli? Who for this reason were led against you, that here they might recognize, even in their own seats, the one whom they should fear. The fury of another pleaded the causes of your long repose. I am silent where lasting peace was enjoined upon you, O Burgundian, since you so obeyed the treaties that what you live keeping festival should be reckoned to constancy, not to fear. This too, who could endure to perish from knowledge—that, by the good of your good fortune, we have seen the weapons of the perfidious clashing among themselves, and the hostile lines fall while you were occupied in other matters by a holy encounter? How often has he conquered for you who had taken up against you vows of fighting?
Let Fridericus tell, who, after he broke faith, accompanied your enemies in their destruction, brandishing arms against those with whom he had by error been allied, when there arose among the wicked a discord concerning this very thing which they understood—that they willed one and the same. Let the divinity be present and prolong its benefits unto the age, by whose disposing longed-for quarrels arose among the guilty. For Fridericus, after he had accomplished for you a triumph over your adversaries, furnished one over himself. XI. A great part of your venerable merits draws me to another quarter. I see an unhoped-for splendor come to the ashes of cities, and amid the fullness of civility palace-roofs gleaming everywhere. I see buildings finished before it had befallen me to find them planned.
That very mother of cities, Rome, grows young again by cutting away the withered limbs of old age. Grant pardon, O sacred rudiments of the Lupercal genius: it is more to repel a downfall than to have given beginnings. To this is added, that you have veiled the crown of the senate-house with countless flowers. No despair touched anyone in the matter of honors, whom a good conscience aided as he made his plea. He knows not to doubt concerning honors, who, poor, did not beg with splendid merits. Either we are good by our own resolve, or we are formed by your example. The resources of the commonwealth have grown with the advances of private men: nowhere in your court is there canvassing, and everywhere a diffusion of wealth. No one departs ungifted, and no one groans at the inconveniences of proscription. In your embassies there is immortal vigor—
—you arrange the order of your mandates before you behold the envoys; nor are things contrary found to your rejoinders, nor does an easy solution meet your objections. The princely reputation keeps watch in place of arms: the king's great solicitude guards our leisures, nor yet do you cease to extend the fortresses, prolonging your cares into the long term. Neither is the security of a brave man lacking in you, nor the caution of one who fears. O double fullness of virtues in one prince, which reveals God as author, because it has no one among men from whom it might seem to have taken what it displays! XII. But behold, again after solid repose we recall our words to the battle lines: again the trumpet calls eloquence to itself.
The city of the Sirmians was once the frontier of Italy, in which the elder lords kept watch, lest the heaped-up wounds of the neighboring nations should run thence into the Roman body. This afterward, through the negligence of those governing, passed into the jurisdiction of the Gepids, whence daily insolence and the disorderly frequency of embassies were dispatched. The deceitful blandishments of a contrivance galled the prince's mind, and, concerning certain other Gepids, whose leader is Gunderith, the untimely familiarity of Trasericus. You believed yourself to perish in your own injury, because it was long permitted that the possession of Italy be retained while you ruled; nor did the consolation suffice, that you had not lost it, since the grief was immense, why the withholder had not restored it amid the very beginnings of your dominion.