Faith her friends selects Not from the wretched." They decree the crime: Proud is the boyish tyrant that so soon His slaves permit him to so great a deed To give his favouring voice; and for the work They choose Achillas.
Where the treacherous shore Runs out in sand below the Casian mount And where the shallow waters of the sea Attest the Syrtes near, in little boat Achillas and his partners in the crime With swords embark.

Ye gods! and shall the Nile And barbarous Memphis and th' effeminate crew That throngs Pelusian Canopus raise Its thoughts to such an enterprise?
Do thus Our fates press on the world?
Is Rome thus fallen That in our civil frays the Phaxian sword Finds place, or Egypt?
O, may civil war Be thus far faithful that the hand which strikes Be of our kindred; and the foreign fiend Held worlds apart! Pompeius, great in soul, Noble in spirit, had deserved a death From Caesar's self.

And, king, hast thou no fear At such a ruin of so great a name?
And dost thou dare when heaven's high thunder rolls, Thou, puny boy, to mingle with its tones Thine impure utterance?
Had he not won A world by arms, and thrice in triumph scaled The sacred Capitol, and vanquished kings, And championed the Roman Senate's cause; He, kinsman of the victor?
'Twas enough To cause forbearance in a Pharian king, That he was Roman.

Wherefore with thy sword Dost stab our breasts?
Thou know'st not, impious boy, How stand thy fortunes; now no more by right Hast thou the sceptre of the land of Nile; For prostrate, vanquished in the civil wars Is he who gave it.
Furling now his sails, Magnus with oars approached th' accursed land, When in their little boat the murderous crew Drew nigh, and feigning from th' Egyptian court A ready welcome, blamed the double tides Broken by shallows, and their scanty beach Unfit for fleets; and bade him to their craft Leaving his loftier ship.

Had not the fates' Eternal and unalterable laws Called for their victim and decreed his end Now near at hand, his comrades' warning voice Yet might have stayed his course: for if the court To Magnus, who bestowed the Pharian crown, In truth were open, should not king and fleet In pomp have come to greet him?
But he yields: The fates compel.