1. Less of this harshness and aggression!

    Be mindful of God, O nation of the Italians!

  2. You have filled the expanse with treachery and ignorance,

    and mounted the crest of tyranny.

  3. And you sent the ships to bombard Tripoli

    with a war of blazing fires.

  4. They cleave the sea—and breach treaties and the covenant—

    openly, and the protection owed to neighbors.

  5. They were driven by one people's rancor against another,

    who were free from the baseness of rancor.

  6. Whoever saw them sailing imagined that the

    people had risen to avenge their homelands.

  7. No! By the Lord of the fleet, the fleet carried no

    army to the Abyssinians' protected lands.

  8. Indeed, the Italian people are too cautious to

    be disgraced twice on a battlefield.

  9. The war is not against the enemy who has grown

    mighty with infantry and horsemen.

  10. The war is only against those who kept the covenant,

    so their neighbors slept in safety;

  11. and opened their doors with Hatim-like generosity

    to any guests who sought them out;

  12. and granted them the rights of their own sons,

    as the benevolent do for the distressed.

  13. Alas for them! Why did their kindness make those people insolent,

    so they were ungrateful for all the kindness shown?

  14. And why did peace give birth to a war

    fought again and again, whose blaze roasts faces?

  15. Gifts have been sown in the worst of hands,

    which, since they first existed, have been the seedbed of ingratitude.

  16. Then let deeds of honor be thus, in the age

    of the noble lords among the sons of the Romans!

  17. Let none of us trust another—and this

    is what man has prepared for man.

  18. If you greet the stranger, then greet him

    in the shadows of swords and spears.

  19. An embrace may turn into a struggle

    in the age of culture and knowledge.

Sol 6.1