Page:Ten Tragedies of Seneca (1902).djvu/139

Lines 562—608] which before being taken up) had become rusty from long disuse in the preceding times of peace! Now, the whilom warrior, on one side, seeks to repair the ruined city; now the warrior of the opposite faction is busy in rehabilitating the shattered towers, and who quite lately, endeavoured to fortify his portals with iron bars, and in a state of trepidation, behind the niched battlements, as the sentinel watched during the anxious hours of night! Thus the fear of war is sometimes more terrifying than the actual battle. Now the terrors of the sword have passed away, and the sound of the shrill war trumpet is silenced, and profound peace is restored to the rejoicing city of Mycenæ! So where the North-West wind blows violently over the sea of Apulia, the waves swell up from the lowest depths, and Scylla emits a roaring response, as they beat in upon the caverns, and the seafarers dread the seas in their very ports, which the angry Charybdis receives and ejects again with terrible force—and the fierce Cyclops who inhabits the mountains of Ætna, dreads his parent's approach (Neptune) lest his forges, the fire with its noisy wrath, in those everlasting flames should be extinguished by the seas pouring down upon them; and Laërtes, of mean resources, every moment thinks that his little kingdom, will be swallowed by the watery element; whilst Ithaca trembles, too, lest the violence of the sea should overcome its powers of resistance, whilst the waters surrounding it rest as quiet as a mill-pond at ordinary times; in the main seas, whose waves the vessel fears to cut through, with its sails set, the smaller boats sail about playfully, when the sea has calmed down, and it is possible to count the very fish swimming about here, where not long ago, the Cyclades tremblingly feared the sea, when a terrific storm, a storm of unusual violence, raged around them! No condition of matter rests long in the same state; even pain and pleasure visit us by turns, inconstant. Fortune changes the venue from the most lofty situation and substitutes one very much lower. He that graces his head with the diadem, and before whom, the peoples tremble on bended knees, at whose nod the Mede lays down his arms, and the Indian, a nearer neighbour of Phœbus, (more easterly) and the Daci terrified at the Parthian horsemen, with anxious fear that the king holds the sceptre, and he foreshadows all things, and learns to dread the shifting and capricious tides of precarious Fortune and the uncertainty with which they arrive. Thou, therefore, to whom the ruler of the sea and earth has given the power of deciding life or death, hide away thy proud and inflated air; whatever an inferior fears at thy hands, thy superior, 