Arab, and all the Sabæans were turning their backs in a panic:
Even the queen was beheld as unfurling the sails to the welcome
Winds, and seemed now, even now, to be loosing the ropes of the main-sail.
Her in the midst of the carnage, and palid from doom in the future,
Had the Ignipotent fashioned as borne by the waves and the West-wind.
Opposite though as in mourning the Nilus enormous in stature,
Spreading his fluttering folds, and with all its investure inviting
Back to its dark blue bosom and sheltering rivers the vanquished.
Meantime Cæsar, in triplicate triumph, conveyed in the Roman
Walls, to Italia's gods was a votive immortal devoting,

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Even three hundred capital shrines through the whole of the city;

Loud were the streets with the joy and the sports and the plaudit resounding;

Clusters of matrons at all of the temples, at all there were altars:

Strewing the ground in front of the altars lay sacrificed bullocks.
He in the snow-white porch of the brilliant Apollo his station
Taking, the gifts of the peoples acknowleges, and on the proud gates
Hangs them. The conquered nations are marching in lengthy procession,
Varied in languages each, as in habit of costume and armor.

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Here, too, had Mulciber sketched the Numidian tribes and the loose girt
Africans: here, too, the Leleges, Carian hordes and Geloni
Carrying arrows. In waves more gentle now passed the Euphrates;
There the remotest of men, the Morini, and there the bicornous
Rhine and untamable Dahæ, and scorning a bridge, the Araxes.
Such on the shield of Vulcan-the gift of his mother-the objects

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He is admiring; not knowing their meanings, he, pleased with the pattern,
Lifts to his shoulder the fame, and the fates of his future descendents.

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BOOK IX.

Trojans in Camp are assaulted by Turnus: Euryalus' midnight
Venture with Nisus: the havoc of Turnus, who leaps in the Tiber.

BUT, while these scenes are afar in a different quarter enacted,
Down from heaven has Saturnian Juno her messenger Iris
Sent to audacious Turnus. It happened that Turnus was just then
Seated at ease in a hallowed vale, in a grove of his parent Pilumnus:

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Thus from her roseate mouth did the daughter of Thaumas address him:
"Turnus, what none of the gods to thee wishing would venture to promise,
Lo! the revolving day of its own free will hath accorded.
Leaving his city and comrades and vessels, Æneas is absent,
Seeking the kingdom and home of the Palatine monarch Evander;
Still not enough, he hath Corythus' farthermost cities invaded,
Yea, and is arming the Lydians' horde-their yeomanry mustered.
Why doubt? Now is the juncture to order out horses and chariots:
Break through every delay, and seize on his crippled encampments.
Spake she, and, heavenward soaring away on her balancing pinions,
Clave on the clouds in her flight a wide-arched, radiant rainbow.
Instant the warrior knew her, and raised to the planets his folded
Palms, and thus in his utterance followed the fugitive goddess:
"Iris, the glory of heaven, who sent thee to me on the thin clouds
Wafted to earth? Whence came this so unexpectedly splendid
Weather? I see in its midst heaven parting asunder, and lonely
Stars in the firmament straggling! I follow thy marvellous omens,
Whosoever dost summon to arms!" And having thus spoken,

Forth to the billow he strode, and the waters scooped from the top-surf,
Often imploring the gods, and he loaded the heavens with votives.

Soon to the open plain was advancing the whole of his army,
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Rich in its steeds, and as rich in embroidered and golden apparel.
Leading the van in Messapus, the youthful sons of Tyrrheüs
Bring up the rear: in the midst of the squadron the champion Turnus
Bustles, displaying his armor, and over them towers by a whole head.
On like the broad, deep Ganges, risi. in seven majestic
Rivers in quiet, or Nile, when it back in a copious current
Flows o'er the plains, and has presently buried itself in its channel.
Here in the distance the Teucrans descry of a sudden a dense dust
Cloud amassing, and out of the plains uprising a darkness.
Foremost Caïcus excitedly shouts from the opposite breastwork:
"Citizens, what is yon globe uprolling in ebony blackness?
Hasten to arms, bring weapons, and rally and mount to the bulwarks:
Ho! the foe is at hand !" With a vehement clamor the Teucrans
Shelter themselves through all of the portals and fill up the ramparts:
For, when departing, so had Æneas, their chieftain in armor,
Ordered them, if in the interval, any emergency happen,

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Not to venture to risk an engagement, nor trust to the broad plain,
Only the camps, and the walls they should guard secure with a breastwork.
Therefore, though shame or resentment should tempt them to hazard a combat,
Still they must fasten the portals and strictly obey his injunctions;
Armed they must wait for the foemen, entrenched in their sheltering turrets.
Turnus, as speeding ahead he had distanced his tardier column,
Flanked by an escort of twenty selected dragoons, at the city
Suddenly made his appearance: a piebald Thracian charger

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Bears, and a crimson-crested pure gold helmet invests him:

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Soldiers, will any one with me be first to encounter a foeman ?

There!" he exclaims, and twirling in air he has launched them a javelin,
Prelude of battle, then mounted he bounds away o'er the champaign;
Shouting his escort second the challenge, and follow with thrilling
Plaudit. Marvel they much at the spiritless hearts of the Teucrans,
Not to adventure in open field, nor to meet them as heroes
Armed, but to nestle in camp. He hither and thither on horseback
Wrathfully searches the walls, and essays an approach by the by-paths;
Just as a wolf, when he prowling around by a plentiful sheep-fold,
Raves at the pens, though grievously pelted by winds and the rain-storms,
Lonely at midnight: safely the lambs, by the side of their mothers,
Keep up a bleating; he, rampant and viciously savage with anger,
Growls at them out of his reach; for the fury of hunger protracted
Long, and his jaws all parching for blood, but incite him to madness:
Just so within the Rutulian, viewing their walls and encampments

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Kindles his passions, and hot in his hard bones grows the vexation,
How to attempt the approaches, and how the impregnably sheltered
Teucrans to oust from breastwork, and pour them abroad on the common.
So he attacks the fleet, which lay on the flank of the camp grounds
Hidden, and hedged by the breastworks round, and the waves of the river;
In it he orders his jubilant comrades to kindle a bon-fire,
And in his fervor he fills his hand with a flammable pine-knot;
Then do they verily fall to, the presence of Turnus incites them.
But, in an instant, each youth is begirded with blackening faggots:
They have denuded the hearth-fires: smoking the flambeau the pitch-light
Carries, and Vulcan upwafts to the stars the promiscuous cinders.
Muses, what deity kind from the Teucrans so ruthless a havoc
Warded, and who kept off such terrible fires from their galleys,
Tell me; of old is belief in the fact, but its fame is eternal.

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First, at the time when Æneas his fleet was in Phrygian Ida
Building, and getting it ready to launch on the depths of the ocean,
Spake Berecynthian Cybelé, mother of gods, to the mighty
Jove, it is fabled, in these strains: "Grant me, my son, as a pleader,
What thy affectionate parent demands for the sway of Olympus.
I have a forest of pine-trees, cherished for many a long year;
High on a peak was a grove where they formerly offered me worship;
Dusky it stood with its darkening firs and its timbers of maple.
These to Dardania's champion I, when he needed a squadron,
Cheerfully gave; now solicitous, horror harassingly chokes me:
Quiet my fear, and allow this effect to thy parent's petitions,
Grant they may neither be wrecked on the voyage, nor yet by a whirlwind
Foundered, but let it avail them that they were derived from our mountains.
Her did her son, who rotates the stars of the universe, answer:
"Whither, O mother, dost beckon the fates? And what by these pleadings
Seek? Can be counted immortal the keels by the hand of a mortal
Made? Can Æneas indubious rightfully dubious dangers
Traverse? To which of the gods is a potence so marvellous granted?
Yes, when defunct they at length shall their goal, the Ausonian harbors
Haply hereafter attain, which ever, escaping the surges,

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Safe shall have wafted Dardania's chief to Laurentian meadows,
I will divest of their mortal alloy, and will goddesses bid them
Be of the fathomless ocean, like Doto, the Nerean's daughter,
Or Galatea, to cleave through the foaming deep with their bosom."
Spake he, and solemnly pledged by the streams of his Stygian brother,
Yea, by the banks that are flooded with pitch and the ebony whirlpool,

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Nodded it, and by his nod made all Olympus to tremble.
Therefore the promised day had arrived and the destinies fully
Filled the allotted times, when the impudent outrage of Turnus
'Monished the mother to ward from the sacred galleys the firebrands.
Here first flashed on their vision a singular light, and a mighty
Storm-cloud seemed from the eastern horizon to run o'er the heavens,
Choirs of Ida as well: then an awful voice on the breezes

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Falls, and it fills the Rutulian hosts, and the hosts of the Teucrans:
"Be not, ye Teucrans, in haste to defend, as in danger, my shipping;
Arm not your hands for the rescue; 'twill sooner be granted that Turnus
Burn up the seas than my sacred pine-trees. Go ye unhampered,
Go, O ye nymphs of the ocean, your mother enjoins you." And forthwith
Burst they each from the banks the respective fetters that bound them,
And in the manner of dolphins, with beaks submerged, to the deepest
Waters betake them, from whence they—a marvellous wonder-as mermaids 120
Issue as numerous faces, and thence are away on the broad deep

Borne, as had brazen prows there previous stood on the sea-shores.

Stunned were the minds of Rutulians: even Messapus was frightened;

Startled his steeds in a stampede; pauses the stream in its current,

Hoarsely resounding, and back Tiberinus recalls his foot from the deep sea. 125 But his audacity failed not then the redoubtable Turnus;

Promptly he rallies their souls by his words, and upbraids them as promptly:
"Yonder prodigies aim at the Trojans: e'en Jove of his wonted
Aid hath deprived them; no weapons of theirs, no counter combustions
Wait the Rutulians: therefore the seas are foreclosed to the Teucrans,
Hope of
escape there is none; one half their resources is reft them:
Still in our hands is the land: of Italia's myriad nations
Thousands are arming against them. None of the deities' fateful
Omens appal me, howe'er for themselves the Phrygians swagger:
Fates have allotted sufficient to Venus in letting the Teucrans
Land on the meadows of fertile Ausonia. I, too, have counter
Fates of my own, with steel to destroy the nefarious nation,

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Robbed of my consort! That grievance comes home not only to Atreus'
Sons, and to marshal in arms is the lot of Mycenae not only.

'But 'tis enough to have suffered once!' Then should it suffice them
Once to have trespassed, detesting, and well nigh utterly, woman
Kind. This presumption of theirs is the width of a stockade,
Stoppages merely of trenches, but slight separations from ruin,
Give them their courage. But have they not seen the defences of Troja,
Wrought though they were by the hand of a Neptune, crumble to embers?

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