Thrasea.

In these burned streets I wander like a ghost: Rome is no more: O see, my memoried Rome, My senatorial city is burned and gone! The city of Camillus, whose abrupt And tortuous streets my ancestors have threaded, Here going about a tower of Servius, Here an Etruscan temple of carved wood, Here by some patriot tribune’s gabled home: All gone, as the free spirit that made it, gone: And I, like this old beam, in vain escaped The burning, shall be cast out, nor find place In the new Rome that Cæsar promises, O’erlaid with perfected monotony, The textbook ornaments of shallow taste, Imperial gewgaws.—What poet was it said That Desolation was a beautiful thing? What parricidal spirit? To cut down And burn the gnarl’d trunk of a thousand years, And plant the trifling shoot of one gay summer Rootless in the ground. (Cries heard.) What noise is this? Some wretched Christian, that in blind revenge The maddened people sacrifice.

Enter the mob carrying off Clitus—Epicharis following.