Aeneidos XI

Meanwhile Dawn rose up and left the Ocean.

Aeneas, though his cares press him to give the time to burying

his companions, and his mind is thrown about by the death,

was paying the gods their vows, a victor, at the first star of morning.

A huge oak, with its branches lopped away on every side,

he set up on a mound and dressed in shining armor,

the spoils of the captain Mezentius, a trophy to you, great one,

lord of war: he fits on the crests still wet with blood,

and the man's broken spears, and the breastplate struck and driven through

in twice six places; and the bronze shield to the left side

he straps, and hangs the ivory sword at the neck.

Then his companions, for the whole crowd of his captains stood packed

close around him, he begins, and heartens them in their triumph:

“The greatest thing is done, men. Let all fear be gone

for what is left. Here are the spoils, and out of a proud king

the first fruits; and Mezentius here is the work of my hands.

Now our road is to the king and to the Latin walls.

Have your weapons ready in your minds, and take the war beforehand in hope,

so that no delay may catch us unready when once the gods above

have given the nod to tear up the standards and lead the men out of camp,

nor a sluggish resolve, made in fear, hold us back.

Meanwhile let us give our companions and their unburied bodies

to the earth, the one honor there is, deep under Acheron.

Go,” he says, “those excellent souls, who with their own blood

brought this country to birth for us, honor them with the last

and first let Pallas be sent to Evander's grieving

city, Pallas, whom, lacking nothing of courage,

a black day carried off and drowned in a bitter burial.”

So he speaks, weeping, and takes his step back to the doorway,

where the body of lifeless Pallas lay, and Acoetes,

an old man, was keeping watch, who to Parrhasian Evander

had once been armor-bearer, though under luck not so kind

he went now, given as companion to the boy he had reared.

All about were the whole household of servants and the Trojan crowd

and the women of Ilium, their hair let down in the customary way for grief.

But when Aeneas brought himself in through the high doors,

they raise a huge groan to the stars, beating

their breasts, and the palace bellows back with the sound of mourning.

He himself, when he saw the pillowed head of snow-white Pallas

and his face, and the wound standing open in the smooth chest,

made by an Ausonian spear, speaks so, as the tears rise:

“You, poor boy,” he says, “when Fortune came at last kindly,

did she grudge me you, so that you should never see

our kingdom, nor ride home a victor to your father's house?

This was not the promise about you I gave your father Evander

when I went away, when he held me as I left

and sent me off into a great command, and warned me, afraid,

that the men were fierce, that the fighting was hard with such a people.

And now he, taken far in by an empty hope,

is perhaps making vows and piling his altars with gifts,

while we in our grief escort a lifeless boy who owes

nothing now to any of the gods, with an honor worth nothing.

Unlucky man, you will see your son's cruel burial!

This is our coming home, this the triumph you waited for!

This my great pledge! And yet you will not see him, Evander, driven back

by wounds to be ashamed of, nor pray, a father with his son

still safe, for a death of your own. Ah me, what a

bulwark Ausonia loses, and what you lose, Iulus!”

When he had wept this out, he orders the piteous body

lifted, and sends a thousand men, picked from the whole

column, to go with him at that last honor

and to be present at the father's tears, a consolation

small against so huge a grief, but owed to a wretched father.

Others, in no way slow, weave a wicker frame and a soft bier

out of arbutus rods and osiers of oak,

and shade the piled couch under a screen of leaves.

Here they lay the young man high on his country bedding,

like a flower cut down by a girl's thumb,

a soft violet or a hyacinth going limp,

whose brightness has not yet gone from it, nor its own shape:

but mother earth no longer feeds it or supplies its strength.

Then Aeneas brought out two robes, stiff with gold

and with purple, which for him, glad in the labor,

Sidonian Dido once with her own hands

had made, and had parted the web with a thread of fine gold.

One of these, as the last honor, in his sorrow he

puts on the boy, and veils with a cloak the hair that will burn;

and he heaps up besides many prizes of the Laurentian fighting

and orders the plunder led out in a long line.

He adds horses, and the weapons he had stripped from the enemy.

He had bound the hands behind the backs of men he meant to send

to the shades as offerings, to sprinkle the flames with their blood;

and he orders the captains themselves to carry tree-trunks dressed

in the enemy's armor, with the hated names nailed on.

Acoetes is led along, worn out and unlucky with age,

now mauling his chest with his fists, now his face with his nails,

and he goes down, his whole body flung out on the earth.

They lead out the chariots too, soaked with Rutulian blood.

Behind comes the war-horse Aethon, his trappings laid aside,

and goes weeping, wetting his face with great drops.

Others carry the spear and the helmet, for Turnus the victor

has the rest. Then the grieving column, and the Teucrians follow,

and all the Etruscans, and the Arcadians with their arms reversed.

When the whole line of the escort had gone far ahead,

Aeneas stopped, and with a deep groan added this:

“From here the same grim fates of war call us on

to other tears. Hail for ever from me, greatest Pallas,

and for ever farewell.” Saying no more, he was making

for the high walls, and carrying his step back into camp.

And now spokesmen were there from the Latin city,

veiled with olive boughs, and asking a favor:

that he give back the bodies which lay scattered by the sword across the fields

and let them go under a mound of earth;

there was no quarrel with the beaten, with men stripped of the air they breathed;

let him spare men once called his hosts and his wife's fathers.

Good Aeneas, they were begging nothing that could be brushed away,

follows their prayer with the grant, and adds these words besides:

“What fortune, Latins, so undeserved, has tangled you

in a war of this size, that you run from us, who are your friends?

Do you beg peace from me for the lifeless, for men finished by the lot

of war? I would be glad to grant it to the living as well.

I would not have come, had the fates not given me a place and a seat here,

and I do not make war on a people: your king abandoned

our guest-friendship and trusted himself instead to Turnus' arms.

It would have been fairer for Turnus to face this death himself.

If he is getting ready to end the war by hand, to drive out

the Teucrians, it was for him to come at me with these weapons:

the one would have lived to whom a god, or his own right hand, gave life.

Now go, and put fire under your unlucky countrymen.”

Aeneas had spoken. They stood struck dumb and silent,

and held their eyes and their faces turned on one another.

Then Drances, an old man, always set against young Turnus

with hatred and with accusations, in his turn opens

his reply: “Huge in your fame, and huger in arms,

Trojan, with what praises shall I raise you level with the sky?

Shall I wonder first at your justice, or at your labors in war?

We for our part will carry this back to our own city in gratitude,

and if fortune gives us any road at all we will join you

to king Latinus. Let Turnus look for treaties of his own.

More: it will be a pleasure to raise the fated mass of your walls

and to carry Trojan stone on our shoulders.”

He had said this, and every man of them roared the same with one voice.

They agreed on twice six days, and with peace standing between them

the Teucrians and the Latins mixed among them wandered unharmed

over the ridges. The tall ash rings under the two-headed

axe; they throw down pines driven up into the stars;

they do not stop splitting oak and sweet-smelling cedar with wedges,

or hauling mountain ash on carts that groan under it.

And already Rumor, flying, forerunner of so great a grief,

fills Evander, and Evander's house, and his walls,

she who a moment ago was carrying Pallas victorious in Latium.

The Arcadians rushed to the gates and, by the ancient custom,

caught up funeral torches; the road shines with a long

line of flame and cuts a wide division across the fields.

Coming to meet them, the Phrygian crowd joins its own

wailing column to theirs. When the mothers saw them

coming in under the roofs, they set the sad city alight with their cries.

But no force at all is able to hold Evander back;

he comes into the middle of them. The bier set down, he threw

himself across Pallas and clings there, weeping and groaning,

and scarcely at last was a way for his voice opened through the grief.

“This was not the promise, Pallas, you gave your father,

that you would take more care how you trusted yourself to savage Mars.

I was not ignorant of how much new glory in arms can do,

and honor too sweet in a first battle.

Wretched first fruits of a boy, and of a war on our doorstep

the hard first lessons, and vows and prayers of mine, heard

by none of the gods! And you, most holy wife,

lucky in your death, and not kept back for this grief!

I, on my side, by living have conquered my own fate, left standing

as a father who outlives. If only, following the Trojans' allied arms,

the Rutulians had overwhelmed me with spears! I myself should have given my life,

and this procession would be bringing me home, and not Pallas.

Nor would I accuse you, Teucrians, nor our treaty, nor the hands

we joined in guest-friendship: that lot was owed

to my old age. But if an untimely death was waiting

for my son, it will be a comfort that thousands of Volscians were cut down

first, and that he fell leading the Teucrians into Latium.