Laudator Temporis Acti

Petrarch, Africa 6.885-918 ("the Punic youth" = Hannibal's brother Mago; tr. Thomas G. Bergin and Alice S. Wilson):

And as the Punic youth thus fared upon
mid-ocean, there the ever-waxing pain
of his deep wound and the clear prescience
of bitter death, as if with fiery goads,
assailed his fever-stricken breast. Aware
that his last hour drew nigh, he voiced his grief:
"Ah, sorry ending to my life of glory!
How blind the soul to its true good and weal!
What mad, tempestuous force of folly moves
a man of mark to struggle to ascend
vertiginous heights! The summit is exposed
to countless tempests, and ascent must end
in ruinous collapse. The lofty peak,
deluding hope of man, is hollow fame
daubed with the glittering tint of false delight.
Our lives are wasted in incessant toil
of no sure issue; only our last day,
to which we give no heed, is fixed and sure.
Alas for the injustice of man's lot:
the brutes in peace live out their tranquil lives;
mankind alone is harried and harrassed
and driven through laborious year on year
along the road to death. Nay, Death, thou art
the fairest thing we know; thou dost erase
our faults and dissipate our idle dreams,
quenching our lives. At last I can perceive
how long and fruitless have my labors been.
What countless toils I've faced that I might well
have put aside! Doomed though he be to die,
man still aspires to Heaven, but death reveals
the worth of his endeavor. What served it me
to ravage Latium with fire and sword,
to breach the universal peace that ruled
throughout the world and spread a panic fear
in countless cities? What did it avail
to raise up golden palaces and gird
their walls with marble if I am at last
to die, ill-starred, upon the lonely sea?
Dear brother, what are you devising now,
all unaware of Fortune's plan and of
my wretched lot?" And, as he spoke, his soul
broke from the flesh and straightway mounted high
to Heaven, whence it surveyed the earthly plain
and Rome and Carthage with its citadel;
and in its passage Mago found a sad
contentment, that in life he might not see
the final ruin, the shame of mighty arms
once glorious, and the sorrow yet to fall
upon his land, his brother, and his race.

Hic postquam medio iuvenis stetit aequore Poenus,        885
vulneris increscens dolor et vicinia durae
mortis agens stimulis ardentibus urget anhelum.
Ille videns propius supremi temporis horam,
incipit: 'Heu qualis fortunae terminus altae est!
Quam laetis mens caeca bonis! Furor ecce potentum        890
praecipiti gaudere loco. Status iste procellis
subiacet innumeris et finis ad alta levatis
est ruere. Heu tremulum magnorum culmen honorum,
spesque hominum fallax et inanis gloria fictis
illita blanditiis! Heu vita incerta labori        895
dedita perpetuo semperque heu certa nec umquam
sat mortis provisa dies! Heu sortis iniquae
natus homo in terris! Animalia cuncta quiescunt;
irrequietus homo perque omnes anxius annos
ad mortem festinat iter. Mors, optima rerum,        900
tu retegis sola errores et somnia vitae
discutis exactae. Video nunc quanta paravi,
ah miser, incassum, subii quot sponte labores,
quos licuit transire mihi. Moriturus ad astra
scandere quaerit homo, sed mors docet omnia quo sint        905
nostra loco. Latio quid profuit arma potenti,
quid tectis inferre faces, quid foedera mundi
turbare atque urbes tristi miscere tumultu?
Aurea marmoreis quidve alta palatia muris
erexisse iuvat, postquam sic sidere laevo        910
in pelago periturus eram? Carissime frater,
quanta paras animis? Heu fati ignarus acerbi
ignarusque mei!' Dixit; tum liber in auras
spiritus egreditur, spatiis unde altior aequis
despiceret Romam simul et Carthaginis urbem,        915
ante diem felix abiens, ne summa videret
excidia et claris quod restat dedecus armis
fraternosque suosque simul patriaeque dolores.

Wilfred P. Mustard, "Petrarch's Africa," American Journal of Philology 42.2 (1921) 97-121 (at 111-112, n. 14):

The thirty-four lines on the death of Mago have a special history of their own. In 1343 Petrarch gave them to a friend at Naples, under a strict pledge of secrecy. But the friend promptly forgot his pledge, and the passage was soon widely copied and distributed, and so was handed on in a good many MSS. And Petrarch records that it was severely criticized, on the ground that the sentiment and tone were not in keeping with the time, the place, or the speaker (Sen. 2, 1). In 1781 a French editor, J.B. Lefèvre, claimed the lines for Silius Italicus, and actually printed them in an edition of the Punica (after xvi, 27). (Apparently, even in 1781 a new editor liked to offer something new.) Lefèvre had found them, not in a MS of Silius at all, but in a collection of excerpta. Yet he professed to believe that Petrarch had a copy of the Punica, that he thought it the only one in existence, that he borrowed these thirty-four lines bodily, and deliberately suppressed the rest. In 1823 a verse translation of the passage was printed in Ugo Foscolo's Essays on Petrarch, and attributed to Lord Byron. In the following year the translation was claimed by Byron's friend, Thomas Medwin.

Medwin's version:

The Carthaginian rose—and when he found
The increasing anguish of his mortal wound
All hope forbid—with difficult, slow breath
He thus address'd the coming hour of death—

"Farewell to all my longings after fame!
Cursed love of power, are such thine end and aim
Oh, blind to all that might have made thy bliss,
And must ambition's frenzy come to this?
From height to height aspiring still to rise,
Man stands rejoicing on the precipice,
Nor sees the innumerable storms that wait
To level all the projects of the great.
Oh, trembling pinnacle of power on earth!
Deceitful hopes! and glory blazon'd forth
With false, fictitious blandishments! Oh, life
Of doubt and danger, and perpetual strife
With death! And, thou! worse than this night of woe
That comest to all, but ah! when none can know,
Hour singled from all years! why must man bear
A lot so sad? The tribes of earth and air
No thoughts of future ill in life molest,
And when they die, sleep on, and take their rest;
But man in restless dreams spends all his years,
And shortens life with death's encroaching fears.
Oh, thou, whose cold hand tears the veil from error,
Whose hollow eye is our delusion's mirror!
Death, life's chief blessing! At this hour of fate,
Wretch that I am! I see my faults too late.
Perils ill-sought, and crimes ill worth the price,
Pass on in dire review before my eyes;
Yet, thing of dust, and on the verge of night,
Man dares to climb the stars, and on the height
Of heaven his owlet vision dares to bend
From that low earth, where all his hopes descend.
What then avails me in this trying hour,
Or thee, my Italy, this arm of power?
Why did I bid the torch of ravage flame?
Ah! why as with a trumpet's tongue proclaim
The rights of man? confounding wrong and right,
And plunging nations in a deeper night?
Why did I raise of marble to the skies
A gorgeous palace ? Vain and empty prize!
When with it lost my air-built dreams must lie
Gulph'd in the Ocean of eternity.
My dearest brother, ah! remember me,
And let my fate avert the like from thee."

He said, and now, its mortal bondage riven,
His spirit fled, and from its higher heaven
Of space look'd down where Rome and Carthage lay,
Thrice blest in having died before the day
Whose wing of havoc swept his race away,
And had not saved by valour vainly shewn
His country's woes, his brother's, and his own.