T.P. Wiseman (University of Exeter)

"Roman Memory: Theory and Practice"

Memoria Romana conference, Austin, April 16, 2010

1. Memory and history

Homer Iliad 22.304-5 (Hector, quoted by Cicero Ad Att. 10.1.1 and Ad fam. 13.15.2):

μὴ μὰν ἀσπουδί γε καὶ ἀκλειῶς ἀπολοίμην,

ἀλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι.

Let me not die without a struggle and without glory, but having done some great deed that those to come may hear of.

Homer Iliad 6.357-8 (Helen to Hector):

… οἷσιν ἐπὶ Ζεὺς θῆκε κακὸν μόρον, ὡς καὶ ὀπίσσω

ἀνθρώποισι πελώμεθ’ ἀοίδιμοι ἐσσομένοισι.

On whom [Paris and me] Zeus has put an evil fate, so that hereafter we may become a theme of song for men to come.

Homer Odyssey 8.579-80 (Alkinoos on the Trojan war):

τὸν δὲ θεοὶ μὲν τεῦξαν, ἐπεκλώσαντο δ’ ὄλεθρον

ἀνθρώποις, ἵνα ἦσι καὶ ἐσσομένοισιν ἀοιδή.

The gods brought this about, and spun a thread of doom for men, that they may be a song for those to come.

Herodotus 1 pref.:

Ἡροδότου Ἁλικαρνησσέος ἱστορίης ἀπόδειξις ἥδε, ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται, μήτε ἔργα μεγάλα τε καὶ θωμαστά, τὰ μὲν Ἕλλησι τὰ δὲ βαρβάροισι ἀποδεχθέντα, ἀκλεᾶ γένηται.

This is the demonstration of the researches of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that what men have done should not become extinct, and that the great and wonderful deeds demonstrated by both Greeks and barbarians should not become without glory.

Sallust Catiline 4.2:

statui res gestas populi Romani carptim, ut quaeque memoria digna uidebantur, perscribere…

I decided to write out the deeds of the Roman People, selectively, as each seemed worthy of memory.

Tacitus Annals 4.35.5 (on the burning of Cremutius Cordus’ history):

quo magis socordiam eorum inridere libet qui praesenti potentia credunt exstingui posse etiam sequentis aeui memoriam.

I am glad to deride all the more the stupidity of those who believe that thanks to their present power even later ages’ memory can be extinguished.

2. The historian’s problem

Herodotus 1.5.3 (trans. John Moles):

This, then, is what the Persians and Phoenicians say. But I am not going to say that these things happened this way or otherwise, rather I shall indicate the man whom I myself know to have begun unjust deeds towards the Greeks, and then I shall advance forwards into my account, going through small and great cities of men alike.

Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur (London 2003), 20:

The mounting compilation of evidence such as this led Africanists to conclude that … even where memories of the past were supposed to be preserved carefully by specialists – tribal bards and genealogists – the practical limit of accuracy was about 120 years. That was when it ceased to be possible to remember conversations with people who had actually once lived through the time being recalled.

H. Stuart Jones, ‘The Sources for the Tradition of Early Roman History’, ch. 10 of The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 7 (1928), 312-32, at p. 322:

To reject root and branch the statements of the Romans about their early history is to abdicate the office of the historian. Amid much that is false the tradition contains a nucleus of truth, and it is the task of the historian to do the best he can to discover it. There is one factor which cannot be neglected, and that is the possibility of an oral tradition handing down, even though distorted, the memory of great events or persons; for the accretions of fiction may attach themselves to what is true as well as to what is false.

But it has also to be remembered that the Roman tradition was a manufactured product rather than a natural growth, and we have not the right to say that, though fiction may invade the record of events, we may always claim to have truth of atmosphere. The atmosphere of the first decade [ten books] of Livy, for example, is evidence for the conceptions formed by men of the Augustan age rather than for the Roman character in the days of the Kings and of the early Republic.

3. First pseudo-solution

Dio Cocceianus 11.37-8:

So I shall report what I learned from one of the Egyptian priests, a very old man in Onouphis… He said that among the Egyptians all past history has been written down, some of it in temples, some of it on certain columns – and that some things were remembered only by a few, since the columns had been destroyed, and that much of what had been written on the columns was disbelieved because of the ignorance and carelessness of later generations. But these stories about Troy were among the most recent, for Menelaus had arrived among them and narrated everything just as it happened.

Dictys Cretensis Ephemeris belli Troiani pref.:

Dictys, a Cretan from the city of Cnossos, was a contemporary of the sons of Atreus, skilled in the language and letters of the Phoenicians, which had been brought into Achaea by Cadmus. He was a companion of Idomeneus son of Deucalion and Meriones son of Molus, who had come leading an army against Troy, and was instructed by them to write the annals of the Trojan war. So he set out nine volumes about the whole war in Phoenician script on lime-bark, and when he returned to Crete in old age he gave orders on his deathbed that they should be buried with him. Following his instructions, therefore, they put the said lime-bark books in a tin chest and consigned it to his tomb.

However, at a later time, in the thirteenth year of Nero’s reign, there were earthquakes at Cnossos which opened up many tombs, including that of Dictys, with the result that the chest was visible to those going by. When some passing shepherds saw it, they thought it was a treasure, took it out of the tomb, and opened it. Finding the lime-bark books written in letters that were unknown to them, they took them to their master, one Eupraxides, who recognised what they were and offered them to Rutilius Rufus, the then governor of the island. Thinking that they contained secrets, Rutilius passed them on to Nero along with Eupraxides himself. When Nero received them, he recognised that the script was Punic and summoned experts, who came and translated them all. When Nero realised that they were the work of a man of the distant past who had been at Troy, he ordered that they be translated into Greek, and from them a truer text of the Trojan War became known to all. He gave Eupraxides a reward, and the Roman citizenship, and sent him home; but the annals written under the name of Dictys he received into the Greek library. The sequence is published in the following text.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae 1.1 (trans. Lewis Thorpe):

Whenever I have chanced to think about the history of the kings of Britain, on those occasions when I have been turning over a great many such matters in my mind, it has seemed a remarkable thing to me that, apart from such mention of them as Gildas and Bede had each made in a brilliant book on the subject, I have not been able to discover anything at all on the kings who lived here before the Incarnation of Christ, or indeed about Arthur and all the others who followed on after the Incarnation. Yet the deeds of these men were such that they deserve to be praised for all time. What is more, these deeds were handed joyfully down in oral tradition, just as if they had been committed to writing, by many people who had only their memories to rely on.

At a time when I was giving a good deal of attention to such matters, Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford, a man skilled in the art of public speaking and well-informed about the history of foreign countries, presented me with a certain very ancient book written in the British language. This book, attractively composed to form a consecutive and orderly narrative, set out all the deeds of these men, from Brutus, the first king of the Britons, down to Cadwallader the son of Cadwallo. At Walter’s request I have taken the trouble to translate the book into Latin, although, indeed, I have been content with my own expressions and my own homely style and I have gathered no gaudy flowers of speech in other men’s gardens.

Suda A 942 = Acusilaus FGrH 2 T1:

Acusilaus son of Kabas, Argive, from the town of Kerkas near Aulis, A very early historian. He wrote Genealogies from bronze tablets which the story goes his father dug up at a place on his land.

Diodorus Siculus 6.1.6-7, 5.46.7 = Euhemerus of Messene FGrH 63 F2-3:

There is on the island, on an extremely high hill, a temple of Zeus Triphylios, established by him at the time when he was still among men and was king of the whole inhabited world. In it there is a golden column on which is written in the script of the Panchaeans a summary of the deeds of Ouranos and Kronos and Zeus.

And afterwards a written record of the deeds of Artemis and Apollo was added by Hermes.

The Book of Mormon (1830), “Testimony of the Prophet Joseph Smith”:

Convenient to the village of Manchester, Ontario County, New York, stands a hill of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighborhood. On the west side of this hill, not far from the top, under a stone of considerable size, lay the plates, deposited in a stone box. … Having removed the earth, I obtained a lever, which I got fixed under the edge of the stone, and with a little exertion raised it up. I looked in, and there indeed did I behold the plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate, as stated by the messenger. The box in which they lay was formed by laying stones together in some kind of cement. In the bottom of the box were laid two stones crossways of the box, and on these stones lay the plates and the other things with them.

Wolfgang Speyer, Bücherfunde in der Glaubenswerbung der Antike (Hypomnemata 24, Göttingen 1970).

4. Second pseudo-solution

Discovery of eighth-century BC Palatine wall announced in February 1989. Result:

Andrea Carandini, La nascita di Roma: Dèi, Lari, eroi e uomini all’alba di una civiltà, Turin 1997.

Andrea Carandini and Rosanna Cappelli (eds), Roma: Romolo, Remo e la fondazione della città, Milan 2000.

Andrea Carandini, Archeologia del mito: Emozione e ragione fra primitivi e moderni, Turin 2002.

Andrea Carandini, “Il mito romuleo e le origini di Roma”, in Mario Citroni (ed.), Memoria e identità: La cultura romana costruisce la sua immagine (Florence 2003), 3-19.

Andrea Carandini, Remo e Romolo: Dai rioni dei Quiriti alla città di Romolo (775/750-700/675 a.C.), Turin 2006.

Andrea Carandini (ed.), La leggenda di Roma, vol. 1 Dalla nascita dei gemelli alla fondazione della città, Milan 2006; vol.s 2 and 3 forthcoming.

Andrea Carandini, Roma: Il primo giorno, Turin 2007.

Andrea Carandini, Sindrome occidentale: Conversazioni fra un archeologo e uno storico sull’ origine a Roma del diritto, della politica e dello stato, Genoa 2007.

Carandini 2003.11-12 (trans. TPW):

Who is it that interprets the walls in terms of foundation by a first king (whether called Romulus or not) – Andrea Carandini? or more than twenty generations of Romans, with no gap in the continuity of their memory?

Alexandre Grandazzi, The Foundation of Rome: Myth and History (Ithaca NY 1997 [Paris 1991]), 165, 169:

The foundation of Rome is now archeologically perceptible, and that is a totally new development. … The foundation of Rome can and must be placed at the time assigned it by legend, which until now has been condemned and scorned.

Augusto Fraschetti, The Foundation of Rome (Edinburgh 2005 [Rome 2002]), 6, 118-9:

We presuppose that the more important and unusual elements of the legend which became the canonical one of the foundation of Rome, from the birth of the twins to the disappearance of Romulus, had their own value in the cultural memory of the Roman people. Indeed, to use the terminology employed by Jan Assmann in another context, Romulus and Remus must be regarded, to all intents and purposes, as ‘figures of memory’ (Erinnerungsfiguren) through whom Romans of a later era contrived to establish a definite interpretation and a consistent representation of their past, in this case of their most distant past. Replacing the concept of tradition or traditions, at least in certain circumstances, with that of cultural memory will also allow us to evade a danger which would otherwise be difficult to escape: the danger of having another discussion about the date of origin of the legend of the twins, a date which we have seen fluctuate wildly between the archaic age and the end of the fourth century BC.

Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung, und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, München 1992.

Carandini1997.633 [trans. TPW]:

Our wall constitutes a monumental tradition and therefore a record which lasts from the second half of the eighth century down to Augustus – an emblematic case of verifiably continuous historical memory. … [T]his monumental reality demonstrates a continuity between the end of proto-history and the principate which no-one before could ever have suspected.

Karl-J. Hölkeskamp, “History and Collective Memory in the Middle Republic”, in N. Rosenstein and R. Morstein-Marx (eds), A Companion to the Roman Republic (Malden MA and Oxford 2006), 478-95, at p. 491:

The permanent presence of Rome’s monumental memory, with its constant reminders and its literally omnipresent allusions to specific stories on the one hand, and the importance of this memory for the orientation, values and goals, the code of behaviour, the institutions and the political decisions of the present on the other render the distinction between the present and the past virtually meaningless. To put this conclusion in concepts once again borrowed from Pierre Nora, the populus Romanus and its political elite formed a great, collective milieu de mémoire: a vibrant, evolving community of memory. In the midst of this community, there was a complex pattern or landscape of lieux de mémoire: those concrete traces and marked spaces of remembrance remained, continuously reproduced, and indeed re-enforced their meanings and messages over time.

Pierre Nora (ed.), Les lieux de mémoire 1, Paris 1984 [= Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past 1, New York 1996].

5. History and fiction

Thucydides 1.21.1:

… as the logographoi have composed with the aim of enticement for the audience rather than truth, things that cannot be tested, and most of them, as a result of time, having untrustworthily won through to the status of myth.

Tacitus Annals 3.19.2:

That was the end of the avenging of Germanicus’ death, tossed about in various rumours not only among people involved at the time but in subsequent periods as well. So true is it that all the most important events are uncertain: some people believe as established fact things they have heard by any kind of means, others turn the truth into its opposite, and both effects expand in later time.

James J. Fentress, Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford 1992), 73-4:

Facts are typically lost quickly at early stages of social memory. To be remembered and transmitted at all, the facts must be transformed into images, arranged in stories. Internal contexts, such as narrative genres, exist as the typical patterns in which we experience and interpret events of all kinds. Accommodating remembered facts into predisposed internal contexts may impose a radical reordering of that memory at the outset. The conceptualization that occurs when memory is transformed into a story to be transmitted is an independent movement. Facts lost at this moment are lost not simply as a result of the quick fading of the factual content of memory, but also because facts that are not in harmony with our predispositions tend to be filtered out in transmission.

Ronald Syme, Roman Papers vol. 4 (Oxford 1988), 19:

What the writers tell us is shown inadequate on so many counts. The other testimony (that is, epigraphy) is likewise sporadic and fragmentary. To become intelligible, history has to aspire to the coherence of fiction, while eschewing most of its methods. There is no choice, no escape.

6. A world of stories

(a) Athens

Plato Laws 887d, on those who doubt the existence of the gods:

They don’t believe the stories which they had as babes in arms from their nurses and mothers, stories like spells which were told both in fun and in earnest; they heard them in prayers at sacrifices, and saw the visual representations which follow, the part of the sacrifice ceremony which a child most loves to see and hear.

Plutarch Theseus 16.2-3:

In fact it seems to be dangerous to be at enmity with a city that has a voice and a culture. For Minos was always slandered and abused in the Athenian theatres, and it was no help to him that Hesiod called him ‘most kingly’ and Homer ‘the companion of Zeus’; the tragic playwrights prevailed, and showered constant criticism on him from the platform and the stage as a dangerous and violent man.

Plutarch Theseus 28.2:

As for the misfortunes of Phaedra and Theseus’ son, since there is no opposition between historians and tragic playwrights, we must suppose that they took place as all the playwrights have made them.

Pausanias Description of Greece 1.3.3, on the idea that Theseus founded Athenian democracy:

That is an example of the false beliefs that the majority of people state, since they are ignorant of history and consider trustworthy whatever they have heard since childhood in choruses and tragedies.

(b) Rome

Cicero De legibus 1.47, on the senses being more reliable than beliefs and opinions:

For our senses are not perverted by a parent, a nurse, a teacher, a poet or the stage, and they are not led astray by the consensus of the public.

Varro De lingua Latina 6.18, on the ‘Nonae Caprotinae’ ritual:

The togata praetexta given at the Games of Apollo taught the people why this is done.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus Roman Antiquities 1.79.11, 8.62.3:

[Romulus and Remus, like offspring of the gods] …and as such they are still celebrated by the Romans in the hymns of their country.

[On Marcius ‘Coriolanus’] Though nearly five hundred years have already elapsed since his death down to the present time, his memory has not become extinct, but he is still sung and hymned by all as a pious and just man.

Ovid Fasti 4.325-7, Erato on the reception of the Great Mother at Ostia in 204 BC:

She spoke, and with a tiny effort pulled the rope. I shall speak of wonders, but they are attested also by the stage: the goddess is moved, and follows her guide and in following praises her.

(c) Elizabethan England

Nancy Mason Bradbury, Writing Aloud: Storytelling in Late Medieval England, Urbana IL 1998.

Adam Fox, Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500-1700, Oxford 2000.

Hamlet, Act 2 scene 2 (Hamlet to Polonius, to look after the Players):

Let them be well used; for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time; after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.

Hamlet, Act 3 scene 2 (Hamlet to the Players):

…for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.

Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599 (trans. Clare Williams, 1937), 166, 170:

On September 21st after lunch, about two o’clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first emperor Julius Caesar with a cast of some fifteen people. [Platter goes on to describe the Bishopsgate playhouse, a cockfight, and bull- and bear-baiting.] With these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad; indeed men and womenfolk visit such places without scruple, since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.

Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil [1592] (ed. Stanley Wells, 1964), 64-5, defending ‘sloth’, of which plays are an example:

Nay, what if I prove plays to be no extreme, but a rare exercise of virtue?

First, for the subject of them: for the most part it is borrowed out of our English chronicles, wherein our forefathers’ valiant acts, that have lien long buried in rusty brass and wormeaten books, are revived, and they themselves raised from the grave of oblivion and brought to plead their aged honours in open presence, than which what can be a sharper reproof to these degenerate effeminate days of ours? How would it have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lien two hundred years in his tomb he should triumph again on the stage, and have his bones new-embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least, at several times, who in the tragedian that represents his person imagine they behold him fresh bleeding!

I will defend it against any cullion or club-fisted usurer of them all, there is no immortality can be given a man on earth like unto plays. … All arts to them are vanity; and if you tell them what a glorious thing it is to have Henry the Fifth represented on the stage leading the French king prisoner and forcing both him and the Dauphin to swear lealty, ‘Ay but’ – will they say – ‘what do we get by it?’ …

In plays all cozenages, all cunning drifts overgilded with outward holiness, all stratagems of war, all the cankerworms that breed on the rust of peace, are most lively anatomized. They show the ill success of treason, the fall of hasty climbers, the wretched end of usurpers, the misery of civil dissension, and how just God is evermore in punishing of murder.

Gentleman’s Magazine 44 (1774), 17, ‘on the authority of Judge Burnet’ [Sir Thomas Burnet (1694-1753), son of Bishop Burnet]:

The Duke of Marlborough talking over some point of English history with Bishop Burnet, and advancing some anachronisms and strange matters of fact, his Lordship, in a great astonishment at this new history, inquired of his Grace where he had met with it. The Duke, equally surprised on his side to be asked that question by so knowing a man in history as the Bishop, replied, ‘Why, don’t you remember? It is in the only English history of those times that I ever read, in Shakespeare’s plays.’

(d) Our time

Andrew Marr, My Trade (London 2005), xxiv, 56, 284:

We are the story-telling mammal and we constantly reshape the world into narratives which make psychological sense to us. … To work the alchemy, journalists reshape real life, cutting away details, simplifying events, ‘improving’ ordinary speech, sometimes inventing quotes, to create a narrative which will work. It isn’t only journalists. Everyone does it, all the time, mostly unconsciously. … No broadcaster films and transmits the unvarnished, unmediated truth: everything is selected, cut and assembled for effect.

Silvester Bolam (Daily Express editor 1948-53), quoted in Marr, p. 96:

Sensationalism does not mean distorting the truth. … It means the vivid and dramatic presentation of events so as to give them a forceful impact on the mind of the reader. It means big headlines, vigorous writing, simplification into familiar everyday language, and the wide use of illustration by cartoons and photographs.

[Cf. Herodotus 1.8.2: ‘people trust their ears less than their eyes’.]

Ronald Hutton, Witches, Druids and King Arthur (London 2003), 12, 35, 36-7:

Once a fiction is crafted cleverly enough to provide an entertaining story, it has the capacity to overpower virtually any facts given sufficient time. To say this is not to deny that facts are deeply problematic and elusive entities in themselves. It is just to assert that a wildly and patently inaccurate account of events will be preferred to more objective accounts if it is packaged attractively enough, for the simple reason that it will be remembered and retold longer. … It may well be that the sort of bold, creative and imaginative personality which pioneers new areas of knowledge or activity is precisely the kind which will also be too assertive and imaginative in interpretation, and that the Bold Fact is one mechanism by which this effect can operate. The finest scholars can also be the most potent makers of myth. … The discipline of history operates like a science in its negative aspects, of testing and evaluating assertions, and like an art in its positive respects, of advancing opinions about the nature of the past. Specifically, it is a bardic art, as the historian is expected to address the society within which he or she is operating and to hold up to it images of the past. … [The public] still wants from historians above all what it has always wanted since the first bard tuned an instrument to sing of days of old: to be edified and to be entertained, and of the two the latter is the more important.

Ray Raphael, Founding Myths: Stories That Hide Our Patriotic Past (New York 2004), 266, 270:

Irrespective of politics or patriotism, the various tales featured in this book endure because they work as stories. Based on important elements of traditional Western storytelling, they engage and excite and please. They portray America’s birth as a fanciful affair, not a serious threat to established authority. This is important to understand, for a story, if good enough, will generally trump the truth. … So how do we purvey the American Revolution to these ten-year-olds? We enlist the basic elements of successful storytelling: heroes and heroines, with an emphasis on wise men; battles that pit good against evil and David against Goliath; and, of course, happy endings.

7. Memory and ritual

Roman Statutes pp. 516 (lines 1-7), 519 (lines 4-9), 521 (lines 50-54), on honours paid to dead princes, AD 4 and 19:

… and that each year on that day, at the altar which is in front of the tomb where the remains of Germanicus Caesar have been placed, ceremonies for the dead be performed publicly for his manes by the magistri of the sodales Augustales clad in dark togas, those of them for whom it shall be legal and proper to wear a toga of natural colour, with the same sacrificial rite with which they are performed for the manes of Gaius and Lucius Caesar, and a bronze tablet be placed near that tomb, and on it this decree of the Senate be inscribed in a similar way to that in which the decrees of the Senate passed in honour of Gaius and Lucius Caesar were inscribed; …

and that the Salii should include in their chants the name of Germanicus Caesar to honour his memory, an honour which has also been accorded to Gaius and Lucius Caesar, the brothers of Tiberius Caesar Augustus; and that to the ten centuries of the Caesars, which are accustomed to cast their vote on the preselection of consuls and praetors, five centuries be added; and that the first ten centuries which shall be called be named for Gaius and Lucius Caesar, the five following for Germanicus Caesar; …

and that during the ludi Augustales, when the seats of the sodales shall be placed in the theatres, the curule chairs of Germanicus Caesar be placed among them, with crowns of oakleaves in memory of that priesthood; and that those chairs, once the temple of Divus Augustus shall be completed, be carried out of that temple, and in the meantime be placed in the temple of Mars Ultor and carried out of there; and that whoever shall be responsible for the above mentioned games see that they be placed in the theatres, and when they shall be replaced, be replaced in that temple.

Wolfgang Dieter Lebek, “Come costruire una memoria: Da Lucio Cesare a Druso Cesare”, in Mario Citroni (ed.), Memoria e identità: La cultura romana costruisce la sua immagine (Florence 2003), 39-60.

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943), “For the Fallen” (1914):

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted.

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the daytime;

They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain,

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.