Whence had they come,
The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?
What sacred drama through her body heaved
When world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

These lines imagine history as driven by violent, almost mythic forces that erupt through bodies and nations. “Frigid Rome” suggests an exhausted, spiritually cold civilization, beaten down by “hand and lash” (conquest, discipline, coercion). The speaker then turns to Charlemagne’s conception as a “sacred drama,” implying that epoch-making rulers and transformations are not merely political accidents but manifestations of deeper, quasi-religious energies—fate, collective will, or the uncanny workings of history. The questions are rhetorical: they emphasize our inability to locate a single origin for civilizational change, and they hint at Yeats’s recurring preoccupation with cyclical history and the mysterious sources of cultural renewal.