1._
One of the odes of Horace tells how the name of Rome grew to might:
"Till her superb dominion spread
East, where the sun comes forth in light,
And west to where he lays his head."
--_Ode 15, "To Augustus," book 4._
Lucan's lines measured its exceeding greatness from the other points of
the compass:
"Though from the frozen pole our empire run,
Far as the journeys of the southern sun."
--_"Pharsalia," book 10._
"The empire of the Romans filled the world," says Gibbon. It was
"exceeding great," according to the prophecy. In the vision the little
horn that grew so great came into the prophet's view as proceeding out
of one of the four horns that he had been watching. Rome rose to
unquestioned supremacy out of its conquest of Macedonia, one of the four
notable kingdoms into which Grecia was divided. It spread forth toward
the south, and toward the east, and "toward the pleasant land,"
Palestine becoming a province of the empire in the century before
Christ. And it was a Roman force that destroyed Jerusalem and devastated
the pleasant land.
Thus the "sure word of prophecy," with exactness in detail, carries the
history through the centuries to the last great universal monarchy,
Rome.
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