Who could find words, even in free-running prose,
To describe the wounds I saw, in all their horror—
Telling it over as many times as you choose,

It’s certain no human tongue could take the measure
Of those enormities. Our speech and mind,
Straining to comprehend them, flail, and falter.

If all the Apulians who long ago mourned
Their lives cut off by Trojans could live once more.
Assembled to grieve again with the thousands stained

By their own blood in the long Carthaginian war—
The rings pillaged from their corpses poured by the bushel,
As Livy writes, who has never been known to err—

Together with those who took mortal blows in battle
With Robert Guiscard, and the others whose bones are heaped
At Ceperano, killed in the Puglian betrayal,

And the soldiers massacred in the stratagem shaped
By old Alardo, who conquered without a weapon
Near Tagliacozzo when their army was trapped,