Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/431

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CANTO IV.]
CHILDE HAROLD’S PILGRIMAGE.
389

O'er steps of broken thrones and temples—Ye!
Whose agonies are evils of a day—
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.


LXXIX.

The Niobe of nations! there she stands,
Childless and crownless, in her voiceless woe;[1]
An empty urn within her withered hands,
Whose holy dust was scattered long ago;
The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now;[2]

The very sepulchres lie tenantless[3]
  1. ——in her tearless woe.—[MS. M.]
  2. [The tomb of the Scipios, by the Porta Latina, was discovered by the brothers Sassi, in May, 1780. It consists of "several chambers excavated in the tufa." One of the larger chambers contained the famous sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, the great-grandfather of Scipio Africanus, which is now in the Vatican in the Atrio Quadrato. When the sarcophagus was opened, in 1780, the skeleton was found to be entire. The bones were collected and removed by Angelo Quirini to his villa at Padua. The chambers contained numerous inscriptions, which were detached and removed to the Vatican. Hobhouse (Hist. Illust., pp. 169-171) is at pains to point out that the discovery of 1780 confirmed the authenticity of an inscription to Lucius, son of Barbatus Scipio, which had been brought to light in 1615, and rejected by the Roman antiquaries as a forgery. He prints two of the inscriptions (Handbook for Rome, pp. 278, 350, 351, ed. 1899).]
  3. [The sepulchres were rifled, says Hobhouse (ibid., p. 173), "either to procure the necessary relics for churches dedicated to Christian saints or martyrs, or" (a likelier hypothesis) "with the expectation of finding the ornaments ... buried with the dead. The sarcophagi were sometimes transported from their site and emptied for the reception of purer ashes." He instances those of Innocent II. and Clement XII., "which were certainly constructed for heathen tenants."]