Poverty in the House of Amyclas

The strong, the rich, the proud, and the empowered
can batter down my door,
but they will find me unalarmed and leave me still endowered
with the security I have from my first husband: I am poor.

Could Caesar have defrauded grass of dew —
I might have feared his tread, and simpered courtesy.
The years were long till he re-wed me, who could strain a revenue
from morning and a vow from mercy.

“The most popular of Lucan’s figures was Amyclas, the poor fisherman who ferries Caesar from Palaestra to Italy. Lucan uses him as a peg on which to hang the praise of poverty. Amyclas, he says, was not at all discomposed by Caesar knocking at his door: what temples, what ramparts, could boast the like security (V. 527 sq.)? Dante translates the passage enthusiastically in the Convivio (IV, xiii, 12) and recalls it more beautifully in the Paradiso when he makes Thomas Aquinas say that the bride of St Francis had long remained without a suitor despite the fact that he who frightened all the world beside found her unalarmed in the house of Amyclas (XI, 67 sq.)” – C. S. Lewis, The Discarded Image

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