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| Time Changes Nations' Dresses--and Fortunes.
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I.
On the Pallium.1
| 1 [Written, according to
Neander, about a.d. 208.] |
[Translated by the Rev. S.
Thelwall.]
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Chapter I.—Time Changes
Nations’ Dresses—and Fortunes.
Men of Carthage, ever
princes of Africa, ennobled by ancient memories, blest with modern
felicities, I rejoice that times are so prosperous with you that you
have leisure to spend and pleasure to find in criticising dress.
These are the “piping times of peace” and plenty.
Blessings rain from the empire and from the sky. Still, you too
of old time wore your garments—your tunics—of another
shape; and indeed they were in repute for the skill of the weft, and
the harmony of the hue, and the due proportion of the size, in that
they were neither prodigally long across the shins, nor immodestly
scanty between the knees, nor niggardly to the arms, nor tight to the
hands, but, without being shadowed by even a girdle arranged to divide
the folds, they stood on men’s backs with quadrate
symmetry. The garment of the mantle extrinsically—itself
too quadrangular—thrown back on either shoulder, and meeting
closely round the neck in the gripe of the buckle, used to repose on
the shoulders.2
Its counterpart is
now the priestly dress, sacred to Æsculapius, whom you now call
your own. So, too, in your immediate vicinity, the sister
State3
used to clothe (her citizens); and wherever
else in Africa Tyre (has settled).4
| 4 i.e., in Adrumetum
(Oehler). | But when the
urn of worldly5
lots varied, and God
favoured the Romans, the sister State, indeed, of her own choice
hastened to effect a change; in order that when Scipio put in at her
ports she might already beforehand have greeted him in the way of
dress, precocious in her Romanizing. To you, however, after the
benefit in which your injury resulted, as exempting you from the
infinity of age, not (deposing you) from your height of
eminence,—after Gracchus and his foul omens, after Lepidus and
his rough jests, after Pompeius and his triple altars, and Cæsar
and his long delays, when Statilius Taurus reared your ramparts, and
Sentius Saturninus pronounced the solemn form of your
inauguration,—while concord lends her aid, the gown is
offered. Well! what a circuit has it taken! from Pelasgians to
Lydians;6
| 6 i.e., Etruscans, who were
supposed to be of Lydian origin. | from Lydians to Romans: in order that
from the shoulders of the sublimer people it should descend to embrace
Carthaginians! Henceforth, finding your tunic too long, you
suspend it on a dividing cincture; and the redundancy of your now
smooth toga7
you support by gathering
it together fold upon fold; and, with whatever other garment social
condition or dignity or season clothes you, the mantle, at any
rate, which used to be worn by all ranks and conditions among you, you
not only are unmindful of, but even deride. For my own part, I
wonder not (thereat), in the face of a more ancient evidence (of your
forgetfulness). For the ram withal—not that which
Laberius8
| 8 A Roman knight and
mime-writer. | (calls)
“Back-twisted-horned, wool-skinned,
stones-dragging,”
but a beam-like engine it is, which does military service in
battering walls—never before poised by any, the redoubted
Carthage,
“Keenest in pursuits of war,”9
is said to have been the first of all to have equipped for the
oscillatory work of pendulous impetus;10
modelling the
power of her engine after the choleric fury of the head-avenging
beast.11
| 11 Caput
vindicantis. But some read
capite: “which avenges itself with its
head.” | When, however, their country’s
fortunes are at the last gasp, and the ram, now turned
Roman, is doing his deeds of
daring against the ramparts which erst were his own, forthwith the
Carthaginians stood dumbfounded as at a “novel” and
“strange” ingenuity: “so much doth Time’s
long age avail to change!”12
| 12 See Virg.,
Æn., iii. 415 (Oehler). | Thus, in short,
it is that the mantle, too, is not recognised.E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
|
