With regard to Scipio,[905] when he saw this famous city, which had been so flourishing for seven hundred years, and might have been compared to the greatest empires, on account of the extent of its dominions both by sea and land; its mighty armies; its fleets, elephants, and riches; while the Carthaginians were even superior to other nations, by their courage and greatness of soul; as, notwithstanding their being deprived of arms and ships, they had sustained, for three whole years, all the hardships and calamities of a long siege; seeing, I say, this city entirely ruined, historians relate, that he could not refuse his tears to the unhappy fate of Carthage. He reflected, that cities, nations, and empires, are liable to revolutions no less than private men; that the like sad fate had befallen Troy anciently so powerful; and, in later times, the Assyrians, Medes, and Persians, whose dominions were once of so great an extent; and very recently, the Macedonians, whose empire had been so glorious throughout the world. Full of these mournful ideas, he repeated the following verses of Homer:
Ἔσσεται ἦμαρ, ὄταν ποτ᾽ ὀλώλη Ἴλιος ἱρὴ,
Καὶ Πρίαμος, καὶ λαὸς εὐμμελίω Πριάμοιο.
Il. δ. 164, 165.
The day shall come, that great avenging day.
Which Troy's proud glories in the dust shall lay,
When Priam's pow'rs and Priam's self shall fall,
And one prodigious ruin swallow all.
Pope.
thereby denouncing the future destiny of Rome, as he himself confessed to Polybius, who desired Scipio to explain himself on that occasion.