What empires the poet did mean there is surely no difficulty in discovering, for those who wish to understand rather than to cavil. The very next line to that quoted is—
"Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?"
and it would require some hardihood to assert that these empires were not on the shores of the Mediterranean.
After all, the best commentators are translators: they are obliged to take the difficulties by the horns. I find, in a translation of Byron's Works published at Pforzheim in 1842, the lines thus rendered by Dr. Duttenhofer:
"Du bleibst, ob Reiche schwinden an den Küsten,—
Assyrien, Hellas, Rom, Carthago—schwand,
Die freien könnte Wasserfluth verwüsten
Wie die Tyrannen; es gehorcht der Strand
Dem Fremdling, Sclaven, Wilden," &c.
Duttenhofer has here taken the text as he found it, and has given it as much meaning as he could; but alas for those who are compelled to take their notion of the poetry of Childe Harold from his German, instead of the original English! There is one passage in which the reader finds this reflection driven hard upon him. Who is there that does not know Byron's stanza on the Dying Gladiator, when, speaking of