ille diu miles populus, qui praefuit orbi,
qui trabeas et sceptra dabat, quem semper in armis
horribilem gentes, placidum sensere subactae,
who boasts that he does not repay a debt but that he gives us of his own, and rejoices to apportion out my daily food to me, as though I were his slave; with a barbarian’s pride he weighs me life or death by hunger, triumphs in a people’s tears, and holds above our heads an universal destruction. He sells Rome’s crops and possesses land won by my wounds. Was it for this that I waged lamentable war with proud Carthage for so many years? For this that Regulus reckoned his life as naught and would fain return to his captors? Is this my reward, father, for my losses on Cannae’s field? Have the Spanish and Sicilian seas resounded so often to our navies’ clarion for naught? For naught my lands been laid waste, so many of my generals slain, the Carthaginian invader broken his way through the Alps, Hannibal approached my affrighted capital? Have I kept the foe at bay with my walls and spent nights of slaughter before the Colline gate to enable a barbarian to reap the fruits of conquered Africa? Has thrice-conquered Carthage fallen for Gildo’s benefit? Was this the object of mourning Italy’s thousand disasters, of centuries spent in war, of Fabius’ and Marcellus’ deeds of daring—that Gildo should heap him up riches? We forced cruel Syphax to drink poison, drove fierce Iugurtha, whose power Metellus had broken, beneath Marius’ yoke—and shall Africa be Gildo’s? Alas for our toil and those many deaths: the two Scipios have laboured, it seems, to further Bocchus’[65] native rule; Roman blood has given victory to the Moors. That long warlike race, lord of the world, that appointed consuls and kings, whom foreign nations found ever formidable in war, though gentle once they had
[65] Bocchus, properly a king of Mauritania, stands here typically for any native monarch.
nunc inhonorus egens perfert miserabile pacis
supplicium nulloque palam circumdatus hoste 100
obsessi discrimen habet. per singula letum