Yet [*/+/^] : 27.225 MHz, Some Final Measures; Augustus, Imperator, Anticipates Reports From Accounts Receivable

[after Luke 2:1]


Lands, properties, glittering jewels, corn thickening in fields;

cattle and flocks, sheered wool, linens, silk, and all manner of flaxes;

slaves to labor; salts of earth; precious metals and wealth of deep mines;

ships heavily laden, caravans fully burdened; fattened grapes pressed to wines;

all sorts of delicate morsels, flavored to taste, tender meats and fresh bread;

the syncopated march of our legions, to strike all the provinces with dread:

all these I take to myself in the name of the Senate and People of Rome.

I am greater than my father, Divine Julius; more even than delicate Vergil's poem

described (yet something between its lines leaves me feeling somewhat diminished:

unfortunate that he disappeared from us before his draft of it was finished).

But, foremost, I love the accumulant numbers that report the taxes:

to my decree, the whole entire world respectfully yields.


Starward

[*/+/^]

Author's Notes/Comments: 

The seventh line alludes to that famous, ancient abbreviation:  SPQR, which, they tell me, is the entire constitution of the Roman Republic, to which the Imperium paid lip service while retaining the forms of the Republic's governemtn and policies, while removing the substance from them.


The eighth and ninth lines allude to the belief that Vergil's epic poem, The Aeneid, is, in some of its parts, actually subversive to Octavian's politics.  The tenth line is meant to suggest the mystery that seems to hover about the death of Vergil; and my opinion that he did not die at Brundisium, as Octavian declared, but fled rather than revise the poem to follow, more closely, Octavian's expectations.  I further believe that he---as well as Caesarion and Cornelius Gallus (also victims of Octavian's ire)---fled eastward to a community of astronomers; from which they traveled to Judea after the great Star announcing Christ's incarnation on earth, as told in the second chapter of Saint Matthew's Gospel, appeared to them; and were described by the Evangelist as Magi, due to the astronomical knowledge they had acquired.

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