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Rh

The last lines assuredly betoken the brewing of a conspiracy; but the poet goes on to lament a state of things where a generation of spiritless nobles replaces an ancestry remarkable for spirit and magnanimity. Though a government by an aristocracy of caste, if of this latter calibre, could not be upset, he has evident misgivings in reference to the present leaders of the party, whose pride he likens to that which ruined the centaurs, destroyed "Smyrna the rich and Colophon the great," and made "Magnesian ills"—in reference to the punishment of the oppressive pride of the Magnesians by the Ephesians at the river Mæander—a by-word and a proverb in the verse of Archilochus, as well as of Theognis. In such a posture of affairs our poet professes an intention to hold aloof from pronounced politics and party—

just as elsewhere he advises Cyrnus to do, in a couplet which may be translated—

He was old enough to foresee the danger of reprisals, and, from policy, counselled younger blood to abstain from injustice and rapine, when the tide turned,—