Prefigurations here, surely, of the anxious messages reportedly passing between Tripoli and Caracas? The tyrant returns, and immediately sets about the business of repression in what is again a Shelleyan fantasy of reactionary violence, painted in the most lurid, although not necessarily unrealistic, colours:

        Myriads had come — millions were on their way;
        The tyrant passed, surrounded by the steel
        Of hired assassins, through the public way,
        Choked with his country's dead: — his footsteps reel
        On the fresh blood — he smiles. ‘Ay, now I feel
        I am a King in truth!' he said, and took
        His royal seat, and bade the torturing wheel
        Be brought, and fire, and pincers, and the hook,
        And scorpions; that his soul on its revenge might look.  
                            (X.8)

Scenes soon to be re-enacted, perhaps, in Benghazi, Tripoli and Bahrain.

In the midst of the violence and ensuing pestilence (evoked by Shelley in what, after many re-readings, I still think of as verse of exceptional imaginative power) Laon offers his life for Cythna, who has been captured by the tyrant. The tyrant promptly has them both burned, in what for Shelley is a stereotypical act of despotic betrayal. But not before Laon has told him that "in the desert there is built a home /For Freedom":

        There is a People mighty in its youth,
        A land beyond the Oceans of the West,
        Where, though with rudest rites, Freedom and Truth
        Are worshipped; from a glorious Mother's breast,
        Who, since high Athens fell, among the rest
        Sate like the Queen of Nations, but in woe,
        By inbred monsters outraged and oppressed,
        Turns to her chainless child for succour now,
        It draws the milk of Power in Wisdom's fullest flow.

        That land is like an Eagle, whose young gaze
        Feeds on the noontide beam, whose golden plume
        Floats moveless on the storm, and in the blaze
        Of sunrise gleams when Earth is wrapped in gloom;
        An epitaph of glory for the tomb
        Of murdered Europe may thy fame be made,
        Great People! as the sands shalt thou become;
        Thy growth is swift as morn, when night must fade;
        The multitudinous Earth shall sleep beneath thy shade.
                            (XI.22-23)

He refers, of course, to America; and it would be interesting now to have Shelley's thoughts on the extent to which America has either shunned or embraced an imperial destiny over the past two centuries.