Servants the waters provide for their hands, and the bounties of Ceres
Serve out in baskets, and pass round napkins of glossiest velvet.
Fifty within are the maidens, on whom is devolving in long row
Care of preparing the courses, and lighting the fires to the home-gods.
Equal in age are a hundred more, and as many attendant
Waiters to furnish the tables with food, and distribute the goblets.
Tyrians, too, have, through the jocund thresholds assembling,
Gathered, and ready, as bidden, recline on the tapestried couches.
Charmed are they all with the gifts of Æneas, and charmed with lülus;
Charmed with the glowing looks of the god, and his mimicked expressions; 710
Charmed with the shawl, and the vesture embroidered with yellow acanthus.
Chiefly the hapless Phoenician, now doomed to the future infection,
Cannot her mind suffice, and is all aglow in observing :
Equally moved is she, too, with the boy and his exquisite presents.
When he has hung on the neck, and within the embrace of Æneas ;
When he has sated the measureless love of his putative father,
Then he repairs to the queen, and she now with her eyes and her whole heart
Clasps him, and oft on her lap does Dido caress him, unconscious
In it how mighty the god that besets her. In memory meanwhile,
Keeping his fond Acidalian mother, he little by little
Ventures to blot out Sychæus, and charge, with a living affection,
Her long stagnant emotions, and heart unused to their throbbings.
Soon as the first pause came, and removed were the tables,
Huge crocks station they round, and the wines encircle with garlands.
Echoes the din from the roofs, and they roll out the shouts through the ample 725
Courtyards pendulous chandeliers hang from the glittering ceilings
Blazing, and waxed rope-tapers with flames extinguish the midnight.
Here did the queen for a chalice, heavy with gems and with gold-work,
Call, and she filled it with wine-the chalice which Belus, and all from
Belus, had handed; and then, when silence was made in the mansions :
"Jove," she exclaims, "for they tell us thou givest the statues for strangers,
Grant that this day be to Tyrians, and comers from Troja, auspicious;
Grant that our future descendants may hold it in lasting remembrance!
Bacchus be present the giver of cheer, and Juno propitious:
You, ye Tyrians also right heartily honor the meeting."
Spake she, and poured on the table libative a liquor-oblation.
First in presenting, she touched with the tips of her lips the libation,
Then she to Bitias handed it bantering: greedy the foaming
Chalice he drained, and flooded himself from the bountiful gold-cup:
Afterwards other patricians. The long-haired minstrel Iöpas
Chants on his gilded cithern what Atlas the mighty had taught him;
Sings of the wandering moon, and anon of the solar eclipses ;
Whence is the race of men and of beasts, whence the storm and the lightnings;
Sings of Arcturus and pluvial Hyads, the small and the great Bears;
Wherefore the suns of the winter so hasten to dip in the ocean;
What the impediment blocking retarded the nights of the summer :
Tyrians double their plaudits, and Trojans responsive abet them.
Likewise in various converse Dido the while was the night-hours
Hapless protracting, and drinking in copious draughts of affection,
Many a query propounding of Priam, and many of Hector;
Now in what armor the son of Aurora had come to the conflict;
Now what the mettle of Diomede's chargers, and now what Achilles'
Prowess. "Nay, come," she exclaims, my guest, from the earliest outset
Tell us the Danaäns' wiles, and thy people's afflictive disasters :
Tell us of thine own rovings, for now doth the seventh recurring
Summer convey thee a rover o'er every region and billow.”
During the banquet at Carthage, Eneas, entreated by Dido,
Tells of the wiles of the Greeks and the consequent capture of Troja.
ALL have become now hushed, and intently were holding their features,
Thence from his lofty divan thus proceeded the father Æneas :
"Thou, O queen dost bid me reopen unspeakable anguish,
How that the Danai the Trojan estate and deplorable kingdom
Utterly ruined; what miseries I in my person have witnessed,
Yea, and was of them a principal part. Such scenes in narrating
Who of the Myrmidons, Dolops, or a soldier of hardened Ulysses
Well could refrain from tears? And already from heaven the midnight
Damply descends, and the setting stars are persuading to slumbers:
But, if there be so excessive a longing to know our disasters
Felt, and to listen in brief to the ultimate struggle of Troja,
Though its remembrance my soul abhors, and has shrunk from the sorrow,
I will begin. Worn out by the war and by fates counteracted,
Danaän chieftains, so many a season already elapsing,
Huge as a mountain a HORSE, by divine machination of Pallas,
Build, and its ribs interlace with a rough-hewn sheathing of white pine,
Vowed they pretend for their homeward retreat: so the rumor is bruited.
Hither selected by lot, they the bodies of warriors slyly
Shut in its darkened sides, and internally cram its capacious
Caverns and womb to the full with a soldiery armed for the service.
Tenedos looms into sight in the offing, in legend a well-known
Island, abounding in wealth, while the kingdom of Priam was lasting;
Now there is merely a bay, and for shipping a treacherous roadstead :
Thitherward wafted, they hide them away on a desolate sea-beach.
We supposed they had gone, and had sailed with the wind to Mycenæ :
Hence all Teucria loosened itself from its wearisome mourning;
Gates are thrown open: 'tis joy to go forth and on Dorican camp-grounds
Gaze, and to visit the places deserted and beach as abandoned.
Here the Dolopian troop, their ruthless Achilles was tenting;
Here was the place for the fleets, and there they were wont to embattle.
Part are amazed at the ruinous gift to unwedded Minerva,
And are admiring the bulk of the horse; and foremost Thymoetes
Urges it trundled inside the walls and installed in the castle,
Either in treason, or so were the fates of Troja now tending!
Capys, however, and those of superior mental discretion,
Order us either to pitch in the ocean the tricks and suspected
Gifts of the Danai, or burn them by thrusting the faggots beneath them,
Or else to bore in and test the interior's hollow recesses:
Rent into opposite cliques is the indiscriminate rabble.
First there, in front of them all, with a mighty escorting assemblage,
Ardent Laocoön rushes adowr. from the heights of the castle,
Shouting afar: "O infatuate townsmen, what marvellous madness!
Do you believe that our foes have departed? or think you that any
Gifts of the Danai are free from deceit? Is Ulysses thus noted?
Either enclosed in this wood are Achaians in ambush secreted,
Or else this is an engine constructed against our defences,
Destined to spy out our homes, and descend from above on our city,
Or there is lurking some mischief; believe not the horse, O ye Teucrans:
Be what it may, I'm afraid of the Danai though tendering presents."
Thus having said, he with powerful vigor his ponderous war-spear
Into the flank, and into the joint-bulged paunch of the huge beast,
Hurled: as it stood there quivering, deep in its womb in rebounding
Echoed the cavernous caves, and distinctly emitted a moaning:
And, if the fates of the gods, if our mind had not hopelessly froward
Been, he had led us to sully with steel its Argolic recesses,
Troja and now thou hadst stood, and remained thou high castle of Priam.
Lo! in the meantime a youth, with his hands tied tightly behind him,
Dardan shepherds, with loud shout up their monarch were håling,
Who, as they happened upon him unknown, had in willing surrender
This same scheme to effect, to the Danai to open up Troja,
Offered himself; of a desperate spirit and ready for either,
Or to achieve his design, or to meet his infallible death-doom.
Trojan youth, with an eager desire of beholding, from all sides
Rally profusely around him, and vie in insulting the captive.
Mark now the wiles of the Danai, and so from a single example,
For, as he there in the focalized gaze, confused and defenceless
Stood, and stared with his eye-balls round on the Phrygian columns :
"Ah," he exclaims, "what land and what main can afford me a welcome
Now? Or what waits me hereafter already a pitiful outcast,
Whose is nowhere a place with the Danai, and even the hostile
Dardans, moreover, themselves are demanding the forfeit of life-blocd."
Thus by his sighs our feelings were changed, and every impulse
Checked we exhort him to tell from what national blood he descended,
What are the tidings he brings, and what credence is due him a captive.
He, with his terror abated, at length tells this as his story.
"I will, O monarch, whatever may happen, acknowledge the whole truth To thee," he said, "nor will I deny that I sprang from Argolic extraction; This at the outset, though impudent fortune hath Sinon an outcast Rendered, she never shall render him also a knave and a liar.
If there has passed through thine ears peradventure in conference any
Mention of Belian Palamedes, and noted his far-famed
Glory, whom innocent, under the flimsy indictment of treason,
Base though the proof, the Pelasgi, because he disfavored the warfare,
Sentenced to death: yet now, when deprived of the light, they lament him.
Nearly related to him, as his escort my indigent father
Hither hath sent me in arms from the earliest years of the conflict.
While he was standing unharmed in his realm, and in councils of monarchs
Wielding an influence potent, we also some name and distinction
Bore but afterwards, when through the envy of crafty Ulysses-
Facts not unknown I relate-he had quitted the shores of the living,
I in bereavement was dragging out life in depression and mourning,
Grieving in loneliness over the fate of my innocent comrade :
Not as a fool was I silent, but I, if occasion should offer,
If I should ever as victor return to my country ir. Argos,
Swore a revenge, and by words I provoked him to virulent hatred.
Hence my original taint of dishonor, and hence did Ulysses
Constantly threaten new charges, and hence did he scatter his rumors
Vague in the rabble, and, conscious of wrong, sought means to attack me.
Nor did he rest indeed, till at length, through his minister Calchas-
But why still do I vainly unroll these unwelcome recitals?
Why do I linger? If all the Achaians you hold in the same rank,
And it suffice you to hear this, then take now summary vengeance;
This would the Ithacan like, and with much the Atride would purchase."
Then of a truth do we burn to be told, and to question the causes,
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