Lays of Ancient Rome - Virginia - 13

Virginia
by Thomas B. Macaulay

But, though without or staff or sword, so furious was the throng,
That scarce the train with might and main could bring their lord
along.
Twelve times the crowd made at him; five times they seized his
gown;
Small chance was his to rise again, if once they got him down:
And sharper came the pelting; and evermore the yell,--
"Tribunes! we will have Tribunes!"-- rose with a louder swell:
And the chair tossed as tosses a bark with tattered sail
When raves the Adriatic beneath an eastern gale,
When Calabrian sea-marks are lost in clouds of spume,
And the great Thunder-Cape has donned his veil of inky gloom.
One stone hit Appius in the mouth, and one beneath the ear;
And ere he reached Mount Palatine, he swooned with pain and fear.
His cursed head, that he was wont to hold so high with pride,
Now, like a drunken man's, hung down, and swayed from side to
side;
And when his stout retainers had brought him to his door,
His face and neck were all one cake of filth and clotted gore.
As Appius Claudius was that day, so may his grandson be!
God send Rome one such other sight, and send me there to see!

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Continued next week. Tomorrow's installment from the great Arab book Thousand and One Nights.

More About This Book

A collection consisting exclusively of war-songs would give an
imperfect, or rather an erroneous, notion of the spirit of the
old Latin ballads.

Scottish poet Macaulay published this in 1842.

Photo, CC-BY-SA-3.0.

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