But I, who spent my years of relegation at Tomis on the farthest edge of empire, know that necessity well. I know how heavy is the lot of the last citizen, who looks out to the harbour each morning to see whether anything is coming from home, and how light is the last stone, the one that says 'here it ends'. Ceuta is such a rock: beyond the strait, far from the senate house, hard by another king who says the rock is his. Two kings, one rock: and the poet asks, Muse, for the cause.

Causes, as is my custom, I find several. The first: the king had to go, because had he not gone, he would have seemed to lose something. The second: the king had to go because the townsfolk demanded it — for those who dwell upon the threshold always fear they have been forgotten by the heart of the state. The third, which the gazette itself confesses: a message was being sent, not to the citizens but to the neighbour. For Rabat, as the same dispatch relates, once answered a like journey with reprisals — what reprisals, the paper does not say; this too I know well: from the frontier much is always reported and little explained.

But I ask, Muse — and you, reader, ask with me — if the rock is truly yours, why must you go there to say so? Terminus, that old god whom Numa set over boundaries, goes nowhere: he stands fixed in his stone, and refused to yield even to Jupiter himself, so that he might keep his place on the Capitol. No one visits Terminus to confirm him: he is confirmed by remaining. Our kings do the opposite: they run to their stones, embrace them, make speeches over them — and the very speech betrays the doubt. What is sufficiently one's own needs no saying.

Nor do I carp at the king: he went, they say, resolutely, and resolution in a prince is to be praised, even in a king who reigns but does not rule, as kings nowadays are wont — a kind of crowned priest, whose words must serve him for power. But words are entrusted to the winds, and that strait is a windy one. Daedalus flew across the sea and came home; Icarus, his son, trusting in wings of wax, fell. Let everyone who crosses to carry a message remember: the going is easy; the return lies in the neighbour's hand.

For what did the king do when he arrived? What a poet does: he gave words. He did not enlarge the harbour, nor the grain supply, nor the citizens' rights — or if he did, the gazette preferred to say nothing, which is worse: for an empty message devours everything. If I were consulted — but who consults an exile? — I would say: send grain, send remission of taxes, send an honest judge; these are the messages that Rabat reads and does not answer. Possession is shown not by the voice but by use: the drop hollows the stone.

And yet — the last cause, and perhaps the true one — one must pity the townsfolk. I have lived on the frontier: I know how quickly cloudy weather comes. While you are safe, you will count many friends; if the times turn cloudy, you will be alone. The king came, saw, and departed; Ceuta remains, and the sea, and the neighbour. 'Every land is a brave man's country, as the sea is the fishes'': but for the weak, good king, the fatherland is the one that does not forget — and it must not be visited once a year, but loved every day.