I murmur not against them, nor repine:
Mere human violence, rapine, and stealth
Have brought me down to poverty from wealth."—(F.)
In another he invokes the help of Zeus in requiting his friends and foes according to their deserts, whilst he describes himself as one who—
That scarce escaping, trembling and half drowned,
Crosses a gully, swelled with wintry rain,
Has crept ashore in feebleness and pain."—(F.)
The bitterness of his feelings at the 'wrong' he has suffered is intensified, in the sequel of this fragment, into the expression of a wish "one day to drink the very blood" of them that have done it. But perhaps the most touching and specific allusion to his spoliation is where the return of spring—to send another's plough over his ancestral fields—brings up to his remembrance the change in his fortunes:—
That warns the ploughman to his task again,
Strikes to my heart a melancholy strain—
When all is lost, and my paternal lands
Are tilled for other lords with other hands,
Since that disastrous wretched voyage brought
Riches and lands and everything to nought."—(F.)
A kindred feeling of pain breathes in another passage à propos of autumn and its harvest-homes. And this pain he seeks to allay sometimes by reminding himself that womanish repinings will but gratify his foes, and
