Aeneidos X

Meanwhile the house of all-powerful Olympus is opened wide,

and the father of gods and king of men calls a council

into his starry seat, from which, high up, he looks out over all the lands

and the camp of the sons of Dardanus and the peoples of Latium.

They take their seats in the hall of the double doors; he himself begins:

“Great dwellers in heaven, why has your judgment

turned back on itself, and why do you strive so, with grudging hearts?

I had forbidden Italy to clash in war with the Teucrians.

What is this discord against my ban? What fear has talked

the one side or the other into taking up arms and provoking the sword?

The right time for fighting will come, do not send for it,

when one day fierce Carthage will let loose against the citadels of Rome

a great ruin, and the Alps thrown open:

then it will be lawful to strive in hatred, then to plunder.

Now let it be, and settle gladly the treaty that pleases me.”

Jupiter said so much, briefly; but golden Venus, answering him,

is not brief:

“O father, O everlasting power over men and things!

For what else is there that we could beg of now?

You see how the Rutulians exult, how Turnus is carried

through the middle of them, splendid on his horses, and how he charges

swollen with a Mars that favors him? Closed walls no longer cover the Teucrians:

no, they join battle inside the gates and on the very

earthworks of the ramparts, and the trenches run over with blood.

Aeneas is away and knows nothing. Will you never allow

the siege to be lifted? An enemy hangs over the walls

of a Troy being born again, and a second army with him;

and against the Teucrians, out of Aetolian Arpi, the son of Tydeus

rises a second time. To be sure, I believe my own wounds are still to come,

and I, your child, am kept waiting on mortal weapons.

If without your peace and against your will the Trojans

made for Italy, let them pay for their offenses, and do not

stand by them with help; but if they followed so many answers

that the gods above and the dead were giving them, why can anyone now

overturn your orders, or lay down new fates?

Why go back over the fleet burned on the shore of Eryx,

why the king of storms and the raging winds

roused out of Aeolia, or Iris driven down through the clouds?

Now she stirs the dead as well (this lot of the world

stood untried) and Allecto, flung suddenly up among those above,

has run raving through the middle of Italy's cities.

About empire I am not moved at all: that we hoped for

while fortune held; let those win whom you would rather have win.

If there is no country your hard wife will grant

the Teucrians, by the smoking ruin, father, of overturned

Troy I beg you: let it be allowed to send Ascanius away

safe out of the fighting, let a grandson be left alive.

Let Aeneas by all means be tossed on waters he does not know

and follow whatever road Fortune gives him:

let me be strong enough to cover this one and draw him out of the terrible battle.

I have Amathus, I have high Paphos and Cythera

and the house of Idalium: let him lay down his arms and live out

his age here, without glory. Give the order that Carthage

crush Ausonia under a great dominion: nothing from that side

will stand in the Tyrian cities' way. What good was it to escape

the plague of war and to have fled through the middle of Argive fires,

and to have drained so many dangers of the sea and of the waste land,

while the Teucrians look for Latium and a Pergamum built up again?

Would it not have been better to settle on their country's last ashes,

on the ground where Troy was? Give Xanthus and Simois

back, I beg, to these wretched men, and grant that the Teucrians

live through the fall of Ilium once more, father.”

Then queenly Juno,

driven by a heavy fury: “Why do you force me to break

a deep silence and put out in words a grief drawn over and hidden?

Did any man or any god push Aeneas

into going after war, or forcing himself as an enemy on king Latinus?

He made for Italy with the fates behind him, granted,

driven by Cassandra's ravings: did we urge him to leave his camp

or to commit his life to the winds?

To trust the sum of the war to a boy, to trust the walls

and Tyrrhenian good faith, or to work up peoples that were quiet?

What god drove him into the trap, what harsh power of mine

did it? Where is Juno in this, or Iris sent down out of the clouds?

It is an outrage that Italians should ring a Troy being born

with flames, and that Turnus should stand fast on his native ground,

he whose grandfather is Pilumnus, whose mother the goddess Venilia:

and what of Trojans carrying violence to the Latins with a black torch,

pressing other men's fields under the yoke and driving off plunder?

What of picking out their fathers-in-law and taking betrothed girls from the lap,

asking for peace with the hand and fastening weapons on the sterns?

You have the power to steal Aeneas out of Greek hands

and to spread mist and hollow winds in the man's place,

you have the power to turn a fleet into that many nymphs:

is it unspeakable that we should have helped the Rutulians at all?

‘Aeneas is away and knows nothing’: let him stay away and know nothing.

You have Paphos and Idalium, you have high Cythera:

why try a city big with wars, and hearts that are hard?

Is it we who are trying to turn the crumbling Phrygian state

up from the bottom, we? or the one who threw the wretched Trojans

under the Achaeans? What was the cause that Europe and Asia rose

into arms, and that the treaties were undone by a theft?

Was it under my leadership that the Dardan adulterer stormed Sparta,

or did I supply the weapons, or feed a war with lust?

That was the time to have feared for your people: now you rise too late

with complaints that are not just, and throw about quarrels that come to nothing.”

With such words Juno was pleading, and all the dwellers in heaven

were murmuring with divided assent, as the first gusts

murmur when they are caught in the woods and roll their blind

rumblings, betraying to sailors the winds that are coming.

Then the all-powerful father, in whom the first power over things is held,

begins; as he speaks the high house of the gods falls silent

and the earth is shaken to its floor, the steep upper air is still,

then the west winds lay themselves down, the sea presses its waters flat:

“Take these words of mine into your minds, then, and fix them there.

Since it has not been allowed that Ausonians be joined by treaty

to the Teucrians, and your quarrel takes no end:

whatever fortune each man has today, whatever hope each cuts his way toward,

Trojan or Rutulian, I shall keep no difference between them.

Whether it is by the fates of the Italians that the camp is under siege,

or by Troy's bad blunder and by warnings taken the wrong way.

Nor do I let the Rutulians off: what each has begun will bring him

his labor and his fortune. King Jupiter is the same to all.

The fates will find their way.” By the rivers of his Stygian brother,

by the banks that boil with pitch and by the black chasm,

he nodded, and with the nod made the whole of Olympus tremble.

This was the end of speaking. Then Jupiter rises from his golden

throne, and the dwellers in heaven lead him, in their midst, to the doorway.

Meanwhile the Rutulians press at every gate around,

to lay men low in slaughter and to ring the walls with fire.

But the levy of Aeneas' people is held penned inside its stockade,

and there is no hope of getting out. Wretched, they stand on the high towers

for nothing, and have ringed the walls with a thin crown of men:

Asius son of Imbrasus, and Thymoetes son of Hicetaon,

and the two Assaraci, and old Thymbris with Castor,

the front rank; and with them go both the brothers of Sarpedon,

Clarus and Thaemon, out of high Lycia.

Straining with his whole body, Acmon of Lyrnesus carries a huge

stone, no small piece of a mountain,

no less a man than his father Clytius, nor than his brother Menestheus.

These fight to hold the wall with javelins, those with rocks,

and to get fire going, and to fit arrows to the string.

And there in the middle of them, Venus' most rightful care,

look, the Dardan boy, his handsome head bare,

shining as a gem shines that parts the tawny gold,

an ornament for the neck or the head; or as ivory shines

set by art into boxwood or Orician terebinth;

his milk-white neck takes the hair let loose over it

and a circlet binds it under with soft gold.

You too, Ismarus, the great-hearted nations saw,

aiming wounds and arming your reeds with poison,

nobly born of a Maeonian house, where men work

rich tilled land and Pactolus waters it with gold.

Mnestheus was there too, whom the glory of yesterday lifts high,

for having driven Turnus off the rampart of the walls,

and Capys: from him the Campanian city takes its name.

They had joined with one another in the trials of hard war:

Aeneas was cutting the strait at the middle of the night.

For when he left Evander, entered the Etruscan camp,

came to the king, and told the king his name and his line,

what he asks and what he brings himself; what arms Mezentius

is drawing to his own side, and the violence in Turnus' heart,

all this he sets out; and he warns him how much trust

human affairs will bear, and mixes prayers in: there is no delay. Tarchon

joins forces and strikes the treaty; then, released from its fate,

the Lydian people boards the fleet by the gods' command,

put into a foreign leader's hand. The ship of Aeneas

holds the front, Phrygian lions yoked under her beak,

Ida standing over them, dearest of all sights to exiled Teucrians.

There great Aeneas sits and turns over within himself

the war's changing outcomes; and Pallas, fixed close

at his left side, asks him now about the stars, the road

of the dark night, now what he has suffered by land and sea.

Open Helicon now, goddesses, and set the singing going:

what force came meanwhile out of Tuscan shores to go with Aeneas,

and armed its ships, and rode the sea.

Massicus first cuts the water in the bronze-plated Tiger:

under him a thousand young men's hands, who left the walls of Clusium

and left the town of Cosae, their weapons the arrow,