LIFE EVERLASTING
LIFE EVERLASTING
Few incidents in ancient history are more tragic than the death of Pompey. The spectacle of the mighty warrior who had conquered the Orient and contended with Cæsar for the mastery of the world, a defeated and despairing fugitive, treacherously murdered and lying unburied on the Egyptian strand, was one that drew tears from Cæsar himself and from many another. Yet among the poets of the sixteenth century Renaissance there was one who took a different view of the matter. In an epigram of incomparable beauty Francesco Molsa exclaims:—
Dux, Pharea quamvis jaceas inhumatus arena,
Non ideo fati est sævior ira tui:
Indignum fuerat tellus tibi victa sepulcrum;
Non decuit cœlo, te, nisi, Magne, tegi!
It is almost impossible to preserve in a translation the peculiar charm of these lines, but a friend of mine in one of the pleasant student days of forty years ago produced this happy and fitting paraphrase:—