Here the vain youth, who made the world his prize, That prosperous robber, Alexander, lies: When pitying Death at length had freed mankind, To sacred rest his bones were here consigned: His bones, that better had been tossed and hurled, With just contempt, around the injured world. But fortune spared the dead; and partial fate, For ages fixed his Pha'rian empire's date. [Footnote: Pharian. An allusion to the famous light-house, the Pharos of Alexandria, built by Ptolemy Philadelphus, son of Ptolemy Soter, who succeeded Alexander in Egypt.] If e'er our long-lost liberty return, That carcass is reserved for public scorn; Now it remains a monument confessed, How one proud man could lord it o'er the rest. To Maçedon, a corner of the earth, The vast ambitious spoiler owed his birth: There, soon, he scorned his father's humbler reign, And viewed his vanquished Athens with disdain. Driven headlong on, by fate's resistless force, Through Asia's realms he took his dreadful course; His ruthless sword laid human nature waste, And desolation followed where he passed. Red Ganges blushed, and famed Euphrates' flood, With Persian this, and that with Indian blood. Such is the bolt which angry Jove employs, When, undistinguishing, his wrath destroys: Such to mankind, portentous meteors rise, Trouble the gazing earth, and blast the skies. Nor flame nor flood his restless rage withstand, Nor Syrts unfaithful, nor the Libyan sand: [Footnote: Syrts. Two gulfs--Syrtis Minor and Syrtis Major--on the northern coast of Africa, abounding in quicksands, and dangerous to navigation.] O'er waves unknown he meditates his way, And seeks the boundless empire of the sea. E'en to the utmost west he would have gone, Where Te'thys' lap receives the setting sun; [Footnote: Tethys, the fabled wife of Ocean, and daughter of Heaven and Earth.] Around each pole his circuit would have made, And drunk from secret Nile's remotest head, When Nature's hand his wild ambition stayed; With him, that power his pride had loved so well, His monstrous universal empire, fell; No heir, no just successor left behind, Eternal wars he to his friends assigned, To tear the world, and scramble for mankind. --LUCAN. Trans. by ROWE. The poet JUVENAL, moralizing on the death of Alexander, tells us that, notwithstanding his illimitable ambition, the narrow tomb that be found in Babylon was sufficiently ample for the small body that had contained his mighty soul. One world sufficed not Alexander's mind; Cooped up, he seemed in earth and seas confined, And, struggling, stretched his restless limbs about The narrow globe, to find a passage out! Yet, entered in the brick-built town, he tried The tomb, and found the straight dimensions wide. Death only this mysterious truth unfolds: The mighty soul, how small a body holds! --Tenth Satire. Trans. by DRYDEN.