All empires die. Rome and Carthage are no more, the Pharaohs and the Hittites are no more. But are they really dead? No they are not, for like the outgoing tide, something is always left behind.

Phoenicia surely is no more
But what if they’d not gone before
How would our alphabet be seen
Would royal purple have been green
Was Gibbon wrong, Rome not decline
Collapse instead, would history’s line
Be any different than we know
Our culture, law, the answer’s No
Empires don’t completely die
Faint traces of them always lie
In language, customs, art and gods
In measure metric or in rods
Is Pericles alive today
Does Homer still have much to say
What will we leave when it is we
Who cut the vine and fell the tree
And leave this cold cruel world behind
For leave we shall, but you shall find
That no one ever fully dies
That every day the sun will rise
And what we’ve been and what we’ve done
Will last as long as there is sun