The day rose on Ariminum
With War's shrill cry—They come! they come!
Nor they unwelcomed came;
Pisaurum, Fanum's shrine, and thou,
Ancon, with thy sea-fronting brow,
Own'd the great soldier's name.
And all Picenum's orchard-fields,
And the strong-forted Asculum yields:
And where, beyond high Apennine,
Clitumnus feeds the white, white kine;
And 'mid Pelignian hills—
Short time, with his Corfinian bands,
Stout Ænobarbus stiffly stands
Where urgent Cæsar wills![1]
Flee, Pompey, flee! the ancient awe
Of magisterial rule and law,
Authority and state,
The Consul's name, the Lictor's rods.
The pomp of Capitolian gods,
Stem not the flooding fate.
Beneath the Volscian hills, and near
Where exiled Marius lurk'd in fear,
'Mid stagnant Liris' marshes, there
Breathe first in that luxurious lair
Where famous Hannibal lay;[2]
Nor tarry; while the chance is thine,
Hie o'er the Samnian Apennine
To the far Calabrian bay!
Wing thy sure speed! Who hounds thy path?
Fierce as the Furies in their wrath
The blood-stain'd wretch pursue,
He comes, Rome's tempest-footed son,
Victor, but deeming nothing done
While aught remains to do.
Above Brundusium's bosom'd bay
He stands, lashing the Adrian spray.
With piers of enterprise the sea
Her fleet-wing'd chariot trims for thee,
To the Greek coast to bear thee;
There, where Enipeus rolls his flood
Through storied fields made fat with blood,[3]
For fate's last blow prepare thee.
- ↑ Cæsar met with no opposition in his march to Rome except from Domitius Ænobarbus, who was stationed at Corfinium, amid the Apennines, east of the Encine lake. The line of march which Cæsar took, through Picenum, was, as Gibbon has remarked, calculated at once to clear his rear of the Pompeian party, and to frighten Pompey himself, not only out of Rome, but, as actually happened, out of Italy.
- ↑ Pompey fled to Capua, passing the marshes of Minturnœ at the mouth of the Liris (now the Garigliano), and from thence over the Apennines, by the Via Appia, to Brundusium in the ancient Calabria.
- ↑ An allusion to the battle of Cynoscephalœ, which subjected Macedonia to the Romans (b.c. 197.) The scene of this battle was on the same plain of Thessaly through which the Enipeus flows into the Peneus, passing by Pharsalus in its course. This alludes to the battle of Dyrrachium, where Pompey was successful for a moment, only to revive in his party that vain confidence and shallow conceit which was their original ruin.
