In this poem, Miquel Costa i Llobera focuses the history of the island in an elegiac tone, evoking the time of the Romans in this romantic setting.

Look: this collection of stones, a nest of death,

This seating, where, alone,

Only a defeated memory comes to sit,

Once they were a theatre and a stage

Where the colony under Roman power

Brought together a disparate and murmuring people.

Here the masses laughed and cried

In the shade of the great and glittering drape,

Open to the wind from the distant horizon,

Whilst the sun and blue of the sea

Watched as your gentile fables

Lazily faded away, my Latin Muse.

Poesies, 1885

Translated by Richard Mansell. 

(Pollença, 1854 - Palma, 1922). Miquel Costa i Llobera was a poet, prose writer and translator. Born into a family of rich farmers who owned, among other properties, the Formentor peninsula, Costa was always devoted to the development of literature. In 1885 he published the collection Poesies (Poems), influenced by French and Spanish romantics. That is the period when he wrote his most famous poem “El pi de Formentor” (The Formentor pine, 1875), which displays a romantic reaction to the landscape. He later developed his own poetic knowledge by reading Lamartine, Leopardi and Manzoni, and from them became concerned with artistic form. He travelled to Rome, where he studied theology and was ordained, and this gave him direct contact with the classical world, a theme that runs through his work. His works include De l’agre de la terra (On love for the land, 1897), Tradicions i fantasies (Traditions and fantasies, 1903) which includes the narrative poem “La deixa del geni grec” and Horacianes (Horatian odes, 1906). He was more appreciated by young “noucentistes” in the early 20th century than by his contemporaries engaged in the modernist movement. Along with Joan Alcover he had a strong and long-lasting influence on Majorcan poets from his time, both his contemporaries and younger generations.

In the poem, Costa summarizes the history of Majorca as though in a eulogy. The romantic context is the Roman theatre of Pollentia, without doubt the first public space on the island dedicated to leisure.

Pollentia was one of the two cities founded by Quintus Caecilius Metellus, the other was Palma, after the conquest of the island in 123 BC. The city's decline meant that even its name was lost, and the present name is Arabic in origin: Alcúdia means "the hill". Although the existence of ruins was known in the 16th century, with the appearance of sporadic Roman artefacts, excavations did not begin until the 1910s and carry on until this day. The Roman amphitheatre used to hold more than a thousand spectators. It became a necropolis when people (for unknown reasons) stopped going to the amphitheatre. It is virtually the only cultural institution that survives from the Roman colonisation, as far as we currently know. It is no surprise that it has inspired writers, especially Majorcan writers, when they have wanted to evoke the island's Roman past.