"Ave Caesar"

Long ago the Gladiators,
When the call to combat came,
Marching past the massed spectators,
Hailed the Emp'ror with acclaim!
Voices ringing with the fury
Of the strife so soon to be,
Cried, "O Caesar, morituri
salutamus te!"

Nowadays the massed spectators
See the unaccustomed sight,
Legislative gladiators
Marching to their last great fight;
Young and old, obscure and famous,
Hand to hand and knee to knee,
Hear the war-cry, "Salutamus
morituri te!"

Fight! Nor be the fight suspended
Till the corpses strew the plain.
Ere the grisly strife be ended
Five and thirty must be slain.
Slay and spare not, lest another
Haply may discomfit thee:
Brother now must war with brother,
"Salutamus te!"

War-torn vet'ran, skilled debater,
Trickster famed of bridge and road,
Now for each grim gladiator
Gapes Oblivion's drear abode.
Should the last great final jury
Turn their thumbs down, it must be!
"Ave, Caesar, morituri
salutamus te!"

Andrew Barton Paterson

Andrew Barton Paterson, also known as Banjo Paterson, was an Australian bush poet, journalist, and author. Renowned for his poignant and humorous depictions of rural Australia, he wrote iconic works like "Waltzing Matilda" and "The Man from Snowy River." His storytelling, deeply rooted in Australian culture, has cemented his legacy as one of the nation's most beloved literary figures.

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English

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Ave Caesar! Morituri te salutant

The coup detat is blotted out
With fresher blood, with blacker crime,
As midnight horrors put to rout
The vaguer ghosts of twilight-time.

Greeting from those who are to die!
Hail Caesar! Draw the curtains round.
In vain! That mournful mocking cry
Pierces the purple with its sound.

And they who raise it enter too,
With spectral looks and noiseless tread,
Unbidden, hold their dread review,
Beside the Emperors very bed.

They sought in his deserted tent;
They found him in the German camp.
They tarry till the oil be spent
That feeds his lifes poor flickering lamp.

The hope of France, the gilded youth,
So answering the trumpets peal
As if revealing how, in sooth,
The gilding oft oerlies the steel.

Soldiers A...

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Arms And The Man. - The Beginning Of The End.

As some spent gladiator, struck by Death,
Whose reeling vision scarce a foe defines,
For one last effort gathers all his breath,
England draws in her lines.

Her blood-red flag floats out full fair, but flows
O'er crumbling bastions, in fictitious state:
Who stands a siege Cornwallis full well knows,
        Plays at a game with Fate.

Siege means surrender at the bitter end,
From Ilium downward such the sword-made rule,
With few exceptions, few indeed amend
    This law in any school!

The student who for these has ever sought
'Mid his exceptions Cæsar counts as one,
Besieger and besieged he, victor, fought
Under a Gallic sun.

For Vircinget'rex failed, but at the wall:
He strove and failed gilded by Glory's rays
So that true sol...

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For The Commemoration Services

Four summers coined their golden light in leaves,
Four wasteful autumns flung them to the gale,
Four winters wore the shroud the tempest weaves,
The fourth wan April weeps o'er hill and vale;

And still the war-clouds scowl on sea and land,
With the red gleams of battle staining through,
When lo! as parted by an angel's hand,
They open, and the heavens again are blue!

Which is the dream, the present or the past?
The night of anguish or the joyous morn?
The long, long years with horrors overcast,
Or the sweet promise of the day new-born?

Tell us, O father, as thine arms infold
Thy belted first-born in their fast embrace,
Murmuring the prayer the patriarch breathed of old, -
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Tell us, O mother, - ...

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Ave, Caesar!

(MAY 20, 1910)

Full in the splendour of this morning hour,
    With tramp of men and roll of muffled drums,
In what a pomp and pageantry of power,
    Borne to his grave, our lord, King EDWARD, comes!

In flashing gold and high magnificence,
    Lo, the proud cavalcade of comrade Kings,
Met here to do the dead KING reverence,
    Its solemn tribute of affection brings.

Heralds and Pursuivants and Men-at-arms,
    Sultan and Paladin and Potentate,
Scarred Captains who have baffled war's alarms
    And Courtiers glittering in their robes of state,

All in their blazoned ranks, with eyes cast down,
    Slow pacing in their sorrow pass along
Where that which bore the sceptre and the crown
    Cleaves at their head the silence of the throng.

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St. Telemachus

Had the fierce ashes of some fiery peak
Been hurld so high they ranged about the globe?
For day by day, thro many a blood-red eve,
In that four-hundredth summer after Christ,
The wrathful sunset glared against a cross
Reard on the tumbled ruins of an old fane
No longer sacred to the Sun, and flamed
On one huge slope beyond, where in his cave
The man, whose pious hand had built the cross,
A man who never changed a word with men,
Fasted and prayd, Telemachus the Saint.
Eve after eve that haggard anchorite
Would haunt the desolated fane, and there
Gaze at the ruin, often mutter low
Vicisti Galilæe; louder again,
Spurning a shatterd fragment of the God,
Vicisti Galilæe! butwhen now
Bathed in that lurid crimsonaskd Is earth
On fire to the Wes...

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