Ere his rival died The terrors that enfold the Stygian stream And black Avernus, and the ghostly slain Broke on his sleep.
Yet when the golden sun Unveiled the butchery of Pharsalia's field (27) He shrank not from its horror, nor withdrew His feasting gaze.

There rolled the streams in flood With crimson carnage; there a seething heap Rose shrouding all the plain, now in decay Slow settling down; there numbered he the host Of Magnus slain; and for the morn's repast That spot he chose whence he might watch the dead, And feast his eyes upon Emathia's field Concealed by corpses; of the bloody sight Insatiate, he forbad the funeral pyre, And cast Emathia in the face of heaven.
Nor by the Punic victor was he taught, Who at the close of Cannae's fatal fight Laid in the earth the Roman consul dead, To find fit burial for his fallen foes; For these were all his countrymen, nor yet His ire by blood appeased.

Yet ask we not For separate pyres or sepulchres apart Wherein to lay the ashes of the fallen: Burn in one holocaust the nations slain; Or should it please thy soul to torture more Thy kinsman, pile on high from Oeta's slopes And Pindus' top the woods: thus shall he see While fugitive on the deep the blaze that marks Thessalia.

Yet by this idle rage Nought dost thou profit; for these corporal frames Bearing innate from birth the certain germs Of dissolution, whether by decay Or fire consumed, shall fall into the lap Of all-embracing nature.

Thus if now Thou should'st deny the pyre, still in that flame When all shall crumble, (28) earth and rolling seas And stars commingled with the bones of men, These too shall perish.