- at nunc semirutis pendent quod moenia tectis
- urbibus Italiae, lapsisque ingentia muris
- saxa iacent, nulloque domus custode tenentur
- rarus et antiquis habitator in urbibus errat,
- horrida quod dumis multosque inarata per annos
- Hesperia est, desuntque manus poscentibus arvis,
- non tu, Pyrrhe ferox, nec tantis cladibus auctor
- Poenus erit: nulli penitus descendere ferro
- contigit; alta sedent civilis vulnera dextrae.
But as to the fact that the bulwarks hang over the cities of Italy, with houses
half-destroyed, and huge rocks, with the city walls fallen,
lie [on the ground], and the houses are held by no guard
and an inhabitant seldom wanders in the ancient cities;
as to the fact that the West bristles with brambles and
has been unploughed for many years, and hands are absent
though the fields beg [to be worked]: not you, fierce Pyrrhus, nor
the Carthaginian will be the author of such great devastation:
it has befallen no [enemy] sword to go deep down;
the wounds of a citizen’s hand are fixed deep.
Notes: I take the quod in lines 24 and 28 as introducing a form of substantive clause (see AG 572) and translate ‘as to the fact that’–facts that are not explained (ll.30-1) by foreign powers having destroyed Rome, but (again) by the Romans destroying themselves.
The first two lines present an interesting movement as regards the ‘walls’ (moenia and muris; I’ve tried to reflect the different words in my translation, though I’m not sure it’s necessary). First, in 24-5, the houses are half-destroyed (abl. abs.) while the walls hang over the cities; then, with the walls having fallen (abl. abs.), rocks are strewn on the ground.
There is anastrophe in 27, by which the connective et is delayed (common in epic) until after rarus, though it belongs before it.
In 28, the second quod signals that we are moving from city to country, where we see that the fields are overgrown and have been allowed to return to nature, though they ‘beg’ (poscentibus) to be worked.
The cause is neither of two of Rome’s arch-enemies, Pyrrhus, king of Epirus who defeated the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Ausculum in 279 but eventually abandoned his campaign after having sustained huge losses and returned to Epirus in 275 (see OCD s.v. ‘Pyrrhus’), nor Carthage. It is not an outside enemey who destroys Rome (I supply hostili with ferro, following the suggestion of Heitland & Haskins), but–to return to Lucan’s common refrain in this opening–the Romans’ own hand (civilis…dextrae, 32; cf. 3, 14, 23).