To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late;
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his fathers,
And the temples of his gods?

These lines come from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s narrative poem “Horatius,” one of the “Lays of Ancient Rome” (1842). Macaulay retells the Roman legend of Horatius Cocles, who with two companions holds the bridge over the Tiber (the Sublician Bridge) against an Etruscan army led by Lars Porsena, buying time for Romans to destroy the bridge and save the city. The stanza is framed as a martial exhortation, presenting the inevitability of death and the nobility of dying in defense of one’s homeland, ancestors, and sacred institutions. The poem became widely memorized and quoted in Victorian Britain as a model of patriotic courage.

The passage argues that since death is unavoidable, the only meaningful choice is the manner of meeting it. “Facing fearful odds” elevates courage over self-preservation, while “the ashes of his fathers” and “the temples of his gods” invoke continuity—duty to ancestors, tradition, and the sacred foundations of communal life. Macaulay’s rhetoric fuses personal honor with collective identity: a “better” death is one that protects what outlasts the individual. The lines have endured because they compress a heroic ethic into a memorable cadence, though they can also be read as an idealizing, martial view of sacrifice that later audiences have applied both to patriotic defense and to critiques of romanticized war.

“To every man upon this earth / Death cometh soon or late; / And how can man die better / Than facing fearful odds, / For the ashes of his fathers, / And the temples of his gods?”