The violet crown by Sir Rennell Rodd :: :: University of Virginia Library

He sat upon the terraced rock of Pnyx,
The dreadful victor, ruthless to avenge
His blight of nature on the blood of man,
Red-handed Sulla. The close Roman helm
Shaded his leprous visage, and his eyes,
Fierce as an eagle's, watched the ruddy smoke
From low Piræus blotting out the sun,
While the mined gates fell crumbling one by one.

From shore to shore, from Sunium to Thebes,
The land lay seared and bleeding. By the quays,
Grim skeletons with blackened ribs adrift,
The hulls and barges smouldered. Famished slaves,
Sweating beneath the legionaries' lash,
Toiled for new masters, levelling the great walls,
The long strong arms which her Themistocles
Had stretched to guard her throne above the seas.

For Rome had spoken. And the voice of fate
Was Lucius Sulla's, and those thin drawn lips

Were pitiless as death. Vain any plea
To purge rebellion's trespass, or avert
His coldly purposed vengeance. Long, too long,
The 'leaguered folk had battled with despair:
Now gaunt with famine, silent, cowed and penned
In their doomed city they abode the end.

Only at times a train of suppliants came,—
Pale starving wives, with babes at barren breast,
Young maids with hair unbound and haggard eyes:—
Humbly afar they knelt down in the dust,
Beating their bosoms, flinging up white arms
With prayerful palms extended. But none passed
The screen of lictors, and the hollow sky
Alone received their ineffectual cry.

And the priests followed, grave and bowed with years,
Pointing the fillets on their hoary brows,
Craving his pity for the ancient fanes,
The shrines of heroes in all lands renowned;
Lest she be roused, the goddess of dread name,
Resentful of usurped omnipotence.
Unmoved he heard; he mocked not man's despair,
But their own gods were not more deaf to prayer.

Yet, ever as his captains came and went,
Or messengers with streaming brows rode in
To lay their tablets on his knees, a voice,
Low but insistent, hushed and yet again
Prevailing through the clamour of the noon,
Touched the reluctant mystic; a voice strange
And yet familiar, dominant to fill
The conscious soul that wrestled with his will.

‘Lift up thine eyes, O victor, to the sun,
Gilding the roof of the great fane, and say
Has earth another miracle like this!
Was ever work of human hand so fair,
So throned, so footstooled? Is there any land
So holy for the memory of her sons?
Alas for man, the dust that borrows breath,
Whose work outlives his own swift doom of death!

‘Was it not here, while still his half-formed mind
Groped in the dimness for a god to guide,
Quaked at the thunder, shuddered in the noon,
That first the living thought struck fire to light
The darkness of the unawakened soul;
Gave the quick stars an order in the sky,

Based the deep roots of wisdom, showed the way
That all men travel in her wake to-day?

‘Was this not she who in the dawn of years,
The lonely outpost of the west, stood firm
When all the myriads of the teeming east
Were poured like sand upon her shores? Alone,
She bore the shock upon the crescent plain
That lies beneath yon marble peak. Alone,
Ere Rome was Rome, her dauntless hundreds drave
The baffled east back on the sundering wave!

‘Was this not she who, when a second time
They came in fleets that darkened all the sea,
Left roof and hearth and in light ships went down
To where yon island narrows the twin gulfs,
Staked all upon her wooden walls and sank
A thousand galleys in her furious charge,
Then from her ashes re-arose like this,
Herself the trophy of her Salamis?

‘Was it not here that in her triumph's hour
Men wrought the marble into forms so fair
The very gods might envy, conjured earth

Into the hues of sunset and of dawn,
Made the blood pulsate on her pictured walls,
Divined the mysteries of sound, the rhythm
Of balanced arc and angle and design
Till man's high craft grew worthy the divine?

‘Was it not here,—is not the live air quick
With voices none shall silence, theirs who taught
The afterworld the sum of all it knows?
Has Rome not paid her tributary back
A thousandfold with tribute of the heart,
And worn these steps with reverent pilgrim feet?
O victor, ere the bitter day be spent,
For those she bore, for all they were, relent!’

The low voice ceased.—And now the autumn sun
Rested on far Cyllene, sank, and left
The fleeting magic of the twilight spell
On Athens in her ring of purple hills,
Throned and transfigured. In the pause of change
The stricken city seemed to sigh.—He rose
And sheathed his sword and—‘Be it so’—he said,
‘I will forgive the living for the dead.’