Aeneidos VII

You too, nurse of Aeneas, gave to our shores

an everlasting fame in your dying, Caieta;

and now your honor keeps its seat, and your name marks your bones

in great Hesperia, if there is any glory in that.

But dutiful Aeneas, the funeral rites duly paid,

the mound of the barrow heaped, once the deep waters

had quieted, holds his course under sail and leaves the harbor.

Breezes breathe on into the night, and the white Moon

does not refuse the crossing; the sea shines under her trembling light.

They graze the nearest shores of the land of Circe,

where the rich daughter of the Sun makes her unapproachable groves

ring with unbroken singing, and in her proud halls

burns fragrant cedar for light through the night,

running the shrill comb across her fine web.

From there could be heard groaning, and the rage of lions

refusing their chains and roaring late under the night,

and bristle-backed swine, and bears in their pens

raging, and the shapes of great wolves howling,

men whom the savage goddess, with herbs of power,

Circe, had clothed out of human shape in the faces and hides of beasts.

So that the dutiful Trojans should suffer no such monstrous thing,

carried into that harbor, nor go in under those dreadful shores,

Neptune filled their sails with following winds

and granted escape, and bore them past the boiling shallows.

And now the sea was reddening under the rays, and out of high heaven

saffron Dawn was blazing in her rose-colored team:

when the winds dropped, and every breath of air fell suddenly

still, and the oars labor in the sluggish marble.

And here Aeneas makes out, from the water, an enormous grove.

Through the middle of it the Tiber, with his welcome stream,

in racing eddies and yellow with heaped sand,

breaks out into the sea. Birds of many kinds, around it and above,

at home on its banks and in the river's bed,

were gentling the air with song and flying about the grove.

He orders his men to bend their course and turn the prows landward,

and glad, comes up into the shadowed river.

Now come, Erato: what kings, what turn of the times,

what the state of ancient Latium was, when first the stranger

army brought its fleet in to the Ausonian shores,

I will set out, and call back the first beginnings of the fighting.

You, goddess, you instruct your poet. I will tell of bristling wars,

I will tell of battle lines, and kings driven by their own hearts to their deaths,

and the Tyrrhenian force, and all Hesperia herded

under arms. A greater order of things is born for me,

a greater work I set in motion. King Latinus held the fields and the cities,

an old man now, ruling them quiet in a long peace.

He was fathered, we are told, by Faunus on the Laurentine nymph

Marica; Picus was Faunus' father, and Picus refers his own line

back to you, Saturn: you are the last founder of the blood.

No son was his, by the gods' own fates, no male issue

at all: one had risen, and was torn away in his first youth.

A daughter alone kept the house and that great seat,

ripe now for a husband, of full years now and fit to marry.

Many were courting her out of all great Latium and the whole

of Ausonia. Before all the others, and handsomest of them all,

Turnus courted her, strong in grandfathers and forefathers; and the royal wife

was pressing with a strange love to have him joined to her as a son;

but portents of the gods stand in the way, with terrors of every kind.

There was a laurel in the middle of the house, in the high inner rooms,

sacred in its leaves and guarded in fear through many years,

which father Latinus, finding it when he laid out his first

citadels, was himself said to have made holy to Phoebus,

and from it to have given his settlers the name Laurentine.

Onto its top, bees in a dense swarm (a marvel to tell),

borne across the clear upper air with an immense droning,

settled; and with their feet linked one into another

the sudden swarm hung down from a leafy bough.

At once the seer: “We see a foreign man,” he said,

“coming here, and an army making for the same quarter

out of the same quarter, and mastering the top of the citadel.”

Besides this: while she was feeding the altars with holy torches

and the maiden Lavinia stood beside her father,

she was seen (the horror of it) to catch fire in her long hair,

and all her ornament to burn in the crackling flame,

her royal hair alight, alight the crown

marked out with jewels; then, wrapped in smoke and tawny light,

she scattered Vulcan through the whole house.

That indeed was reported as dreadful and a wonder to look at:

for they sang that she would herself be shining in fame and in the fates,

but that she foreshowed a great war for her people.

But the king, troubled by the signs, goes to the oracles of Faunus,

his prophesying father, and consults the groves beneath tall

Albunea, greatest of woods, which resounds with a holy

spring, and in its darkness breathes out a savage reek.

From here the peoples of Italy and all the Oenotrian land

seek answers in their doubt; here, when the priestess has brought

the gifts, and under the silent night has lain down

on the spread skins of slaughtered sheep and gone after sleep,

she sees many shapes flitting in strange fashions

and hears voices of all kinds, and is given the company

of the gods, and speaks with Acheron in the depths of Avernus.

Here father Latinus himself, then too, seeking answers,

was killing in due form a hundred woolly two-year sheep,

and lay propped on their backs, on the spread

fleeces: out of the deep wood a sudden voice came back to him:

“Do not look to join your daughter in a Latin marriage,

O my child, and do not trust the bridal chamber made ready:

sons-in-law will come from outside, whose blood will carry

our name up to the stars, and from whose stock the descendants

will see all things under their feet, as far as the Sun, wheeling,

looks on either Ocean, turned and governed.”

These answers of his father Faunus, and the warnings given

in the silent night, Latinus does not shut inside his own mouth;

but Rumor, flying wide about already, had carried them through

the cities of Ausonia, when the young men of Laomedon's line

made their fleet fast to the grassy rise of the bank.

Aeneas and his chief captains and handsome Iulus

lay their bodies down under the branches of a tall tree

and set out a meal, and along the grass they slide flat cakes

of wheat under the food (so Jupiter himself was prompting)

and pile the floor of Ceres high with wild fruit.

Here, as it happened, when the rest was gone, want of eating

drove them to turn their teeth on the thin bread of Ceres,

and to violate with hand and bold jaws the circle

of the fated crust, and to spare not one of its broad quarters:

“Look, we are eating our tables too!” said Iulus,

playing, and said no more. That word, once heard, brought

the first end of their labors; and his father snatched it first

from the speaker's mouth, and, stunned at the god in it, held it fast.

At once: “Hail, land owed to me by the fates,

and hail to you,” he says, “faithful household gods of Troy:

here is home, here is our country. For my father Anchises

left me these secrets of the fates (I go back over them now):

when hunger, my son, on shores you do not know,

shall force you, the food cut short, to eat your tables,

then remember, weary as you are, to hope for a house, and there

to set the first buildings by hand and rampart them round.

This was that hunger. This was the last thing waiting for us,

to set a bound to our exile.

So come, and gladly at the sun's first light

what places these are, or what men hold them, where the walls of the people,

let us track it out, and go from the harbor by separate ways.

Now pour the bowls to Jove, and call in your prayers

on my father Anchises, and set the wine back on the tables.”

So having spoken, he winds a leafy bough about

his temples, and prays to the spirit of the place, and to Earth,

first of the gods, and to the nymphs, and to the rivers

still unknown to him; then to Night, and Night's rising signs,

and to Idaean Jove, and to the Phrygian mother in her order,

he calls, and on his two parents, in heaven and in Erebus.

Then the all-powerful father thundered three times, clear, out of high

heaven, and shaking it himself in his hand he showed out of the sky

a cloud burning with rays of light and with gold.

Suddenly the word runs through the Trojan ranks

that the day has come on which to found the walls they are owed.

They vie in setting the feast up again, and at that great omen

gladly stand out the mixing bowls and wreathe the wine.

When the next day, risen, was going over the lands with its first

lamp, they scatter and search out the city, the borders, the shores

of the people: these are the standing pools of Numicus' spring,

this the river Tiber, here live the brave Latins.

Then the son of Anchises orders a hundred spokesmen, picked

from every rank, to go to the king's high walls,

all of them veiled in the branches of Pallas,

and to bring the man gifts and ask peace for the Teucrians.

No delay: ordered, they hurry, and are carried along at a quick

step. He himself marks out walls with a shallow ditch

and works the ground, and his first quarters on the shore

he rings with palisade and earthwork, after the manner of a camp.

And now, the road behind them, the young men were making out

the towers and steep roofs of the Latins, and came up under the wall.

Before the city, boys and young men in their first flower

are training with horses and breaking chariots in the dust,

or drawing keen bows, or from the shoulder hurling

tough javelins, and challenging each other at the run and the blow:

when a rider, sent on ahead, brings to the ears of the aged

king the news that huge men in unknown dress

have come. He orders them called inside the house,