Aeneidos II

They all fell silent, and held their faces turned to him, intent.

Then father Aeneas began so, from his high couch:

Unspeakable, queen, is the grief you order me to wake again,

how the Danaans tore down the Trojan power and a kingdom

that must be wept for; and the most piteous things I saw myself,

and of which I was a great part. Who, telling such a tale,

what Myrmidon, what Dolopian, what soldier of hard Ulysses,

could keep back his tears? And already the wet night falls

headlong from the sky, and the sinking stars urge sleep.

But if there is such longing in you to learn what befell us,

and to hear, briefly, Troy's last agony,

though my mind shudders to remember, and has flinched away in grief,

I will begin. Broken by war, and driven back by the fates,

the leaders of the Danaans, with so many years now slipping past,

build a horse the bulk of a mountain, by the divine art of Pallas,

and weave its ribs together out of sawn fir:

they give it out as an offering for their return; that story goes wandering.

Into it they secretly shut chosen bodies of men,

picked by lot, in the blind flank, and fill deep inside

the vast hollows and the belly with armed soldiery.

Tenedos lies in sight, an island most famous in report,

rich in resources while Priam's kingdoms still stood,

now only a bay, an anchorage of poor faith for keels:

here they stand out to sea and hide on the deserted shore.

We thought them gone, making for Mycenae with the wind.

So all Teucria loosed itself from its long grief;

the gates are flung wide; it is a delight to go and see the Dorian camp,

the abandoned ground, the shore they had let go.

Here the Dolopian company, here savage Achilles pitched;

here was the place for the fleet; here they used to fight in line.

Some stand stunned before unwed Minerva's ruinous gift,

and marvel at the horse's bulk; and Thymoetes first

urges that it be led inside the walls and set in the citadel,

whether by treachery, or because Troy's fates were carrying it so already.

But Capys, and those whose minds held the better view,

order the Danaans' ambush and the gift they mistrust

flung headlong into the sea, or burned with fires set beneath,

or the hollow hiding-places of the belly bored through and probed.

The crowd is split, unsure, into passions that pull two ways.

There, first before them all, with a great throng at his heels,

Laocoön comes running down, on fire, from the citadel's height,

and from far off: “Poor fools, what madness is on you, citizens?

Do you believe the enemy have sailed? Or do you think any

gift of the Danaans free of guile? Is this the Ulysses you know?

Either Achaeans are shut in this timber and hidden there,

or this engine has been built to face our walls,

to look down into our houses and come at the city from above,

or some trick lies inside it. Do not trust the horse, Teucrians.

Whatever it is, I fear the Danaans, even bringing gifts.”

So he spoke, and with all his strength a huge spear

into the side, into the curved joinery of the brute's belly,

he hurled. It stood there shivering, and, the womb once struck,

the hollow caves rang and gave back a groan.

And had the gods' fates, had our own minds, not been crooked,

he would have driven us to foul that Argive lair with iron,

and Troy, you would stand now; you would remain, high citadel of Priam.

Look, meanwhile a young man, hands bound behind his back,

was being hauled to the king with a great shouting by shepherds,

sons of Dardanus; a stranger, he had put himself in the way

of the men coming, to contrive this very thing and open Troy to the Achaeans,

of his own will, sure of his nerve, and ready for either end,

to work his deceptions through, or to go down to certain death.

From every side the young men of Troy, in their eagerness to look,

come pouring round him, and compete at mocking the prisoner.

Now hear the treachery of the Danaans, and from one crime

learn what they all are.

For when he halted there, unarmed, shaken, with every eye on him,

and looked round at the Phrygian ranks,

“Alas,” he said, “what land now, what waters, can

take me in? Or what is left at the end for a wretch like me,

who have no place anywhere among the Danaans, and on top of that

the sons of Dardanus, in fury, demand my blood in payment?”

At that groan our feeling turned, and every violent

impulse was checked. We urge him to speak: from what blood he sprang,

what he brings, let him tell us, what a captive has to hope from.

He, his terror laid down at last, says this:

“Everything, king, whatever comes of it, I will confess to you,

and it will be true, he said; nor will I deny I am of Argive stock:

that first. And if Fortune has shaped Sinon for misery,

she will not, for all her spite, shape him false and lying too.

If by any chance some word has reached your ears in talk,

the name of Palamedes, son of Belus, and the glory

renowned in report, whom, on a lying charge of treason, the Pelasgians,

guiltless as he was, on unspeakable evidence, because he forbade the war,

sent down to death, and mourn now that he is emptied of the light.

to him my father, a poor man, sent me here as companion

and near kinsman, to the fighting, from my earliest years,

while he stood unshaken in his office and had force

in the councils of kings; and we too carried some name

and honor. After, by the malice of that plausible Ulysses,

(I am telling nothing unknown) he departed the shores above,

I dragged my life on, beaten, in darkness and mourning,

and raged to myself at the fall of a friend who had done nothing.

Nor did I keep quiet, in my folly: if any chance ever bore me,

if ever I came back a victor to my fathers' Argos,

I promised myself his avenger, and my words woke bitter hatred.

From that came my first slide toward ruin; from that Ulysses forever

frightening me with new charges, from that scattering words

of double sense among the crowd, and hunting, guilty, for arms.

Nor did he rest, in fact, until, with Calchas for his instrument …

but why do I turn these thankless things over, and get nothing by it?

Why do I hold you, if you count all Achaeans in one rank,

and it is enough to have heard that? Take your payment, long overdue:

the man of Ithaca would want it, and the sons of Atreus pay much for it.”

Then indeed we burn to question him and to look for causes,

knowing nothing of crimes so great, or of Pelasgian craft.

He goes on, quaking, and speaks out of a counterfeit heart:

“Often the Danaans longed to leave Troy behind and set

their flight in motion, worn out by the long war;

and if only they had! Often the sea's rough weather

shut them in, and the South Wind terrified them as they went.

Above all, when this horse already stood here, framed

of maple timber, the storm clouds crashed through the whole sky.

Uncertain, we send Eurypylus to ask what the oracles of Phoebus

say, and he carries these bleak words back from the shrine:

‘With blood you calmed the winds, and with a girl cut down,

Danaans, when first you came to the shores of Ilium;

with blood your going home must be bought, and the offering made

of an Argive life.’ When that word reached the ears of the crowd,

their spirits stopped, and a cold shudder ran through the deep

of the bone: whom were the fates preparing, whom was Apollo asking for?

At this the Ithacan drags Calchas the seer into the middle of us

with a great uproar, and demands of him what these divine

wills mean; and many were already prophesying to me the cruel

work of the schemer, and saw in silence what was coming.

Twice five days he says nothing, and, keeping himself covered,

refuses to give up any man by his own voice, or set one before death.

Scarcely at last, driven by the Ithacan's loud shouting,

he breaks into speech (it was arranged) and marks me for the altar.

Every man agreed, and what each had feared for himself

they bore easily, once it was turned onto the ruin of one wretch.

And now the unspeakable day was here; the rites were being made ready for me,

and the salted meal, and the fillets round my temples.

I tore myself out of death, I admit it, and broke my bonds,

and lay all night in a muddy pool, hidden in the sedge,

until they should put out under sail, if in fact they did.

And now I have no hope left of seeing my old country,

nor my sweet children, nor the father I have wanted so long;

on whom, it may be, they will lay the penalty for my escape,

and purge this fault of mine by the death of the wretched.

So by the gods above, by the powers that know what is true,

by whatever faith is left unstained anywhere at all

among mortals, I beg you: pity such suffering,

pity a spirit carrying what it never earned.”

For these tears we grant him his life, and pity him besides.

Priam himself is first to order the handcuffs and the tight

bonds struck off the man, and speaks to him as a friend:

“Whoever you are, from here on forget the Greeks you have lost;

you will be one of ours. And answer me truly what I ask:

to what end did they raise this hulk of a monstrous horse? Who thought of it?

What do they want? What worship is it, or what engine of war?”

He had spoken. The man, drilled in deceits and Pelasgian art,

lifted to the stars his hands, stripped now of their chains:

“You everlasting fires, and your power that must not be broken,

I call to witness,” he said; “you altars and unspeakable blades

I ran from, and you fillets of the gods I wore as a victim:

it is right for me to loose the sworn bonds of the Greeks,

right to hate those men, and to bring everything up into the open

that they cover; nor am I held by any laws of a country.

Only stand by your promise; and, once saved, keep faith with me,

Troy, if I bring you truth, if I pay back greatly.

Every hope of the Danaans, all their trust in the war they began,

stood always on Pallas' help. But from the hour when the godless