Book 6

6. Now Titan, whom the Tartessian sea had loosed, diffused into night, was yoking his horses on the Eastern shores, and the Seres, first uncovered by the new Phaethon, were seeking again the fleece in their wool-bearing groves, and the foul carnage lay before their eyes, and nearer was disclosed the work of mad Mars: arms and men at once and horse mingled with them, and the right hands of the slain clinging in the wound of the foe, and everywhere shields and plumes and trunks of bodies without their heads, and the sword lay broken on the hard bones. Nor was it lacking to see the eyes of the half-dead seeking the sky in vain. Then the lake foaming with gore, and corpses floating on the surface of the sea, robbed forever of their burial mounds.

Yet not all Italian valour had fallen amid the disasters. A Bruttian, on the huge heap of pitiable slaughter, showing the unequal battle with his pierced body, had scarcely lifted his sad head and was dragging his maimed limbs through the carnage, his sinews slipping apart between, slender of means, leaning on no father or tongue, but harsh with the sword, nor did any man of the Volscian race redeem more years by a great-souled death. As a boy he had longed to add himself to the camp, the down upon his cheek, and to keen Flaminius he had been a man worth note, when the victor in war, the gods more favourable, was overwhelming the Celtic arms. Hence the honour and the guardianship of the sacred bird in every battle: from this his glory nursed the cause of his death. For, certain of death when he could not keep the Carthaginians from the captured eagle, after he had seen the fates sink down and the battle incline in a great ruin, he was preparing meanwhile to hide it and entrust it to the earth. But, overcome by sudden weapons, he laid his slipping limbs upon it and covered it with a feigned death. But when the light, returned from the Stygian night and the wretched sleep, came back, with a spear from the heap of a nearby corpse he raises himself, and, strong with his whole effort, the earth wide, soaked with slaughter and easy to part, with his sword he digs, and, adoring the buried likeness of the unhappy eagle, levels the sands with his languid palms. Then the last thin breath of the weary man passed away into the air, and sent his great soul down beneath Tartarus.

Nearby one could see, demanding for itself a song deserved, the sacred frenzy of valour. Laevinus, from high Privernum, distinguished by the honour of the Latin vine-staff, lay himself lifeless upon the lifeless Nasamonian Tyres: no spear for the man, no sword: in the narrow strait Chance had carried off his arms. Yet in the naked contest grief found a weapon for Mars. With bloody mouth he fought, and the tooth served the turn of iron for his wrath. Now the nostrils are mangled and the eyes befouled by the bite, now the head is maimed, the ears torn away, and the very brow is gnawed away in dreadful fashion, and the gaping mouth flows with blood; nor was there satiety, until the breath should leave the chewing mouth and black death hold the jaws filled.

While sad valour offers such wonders, meanwhile the fleeing wounded throng is tossed in scattered chance, and through the woods, by trackless and blind ways, borne off by stealth with many a wound, they measure the lonely fields through the night. Every sound and breeze terrifies them, and the bird stirred by its light wing. No sleep or rest for the mind. Harshly now Mago drives the stunned men with bitter spear, now towering Hannibal. Serranus, a famous name, your offspring, Regulus, you who, your fame swelling through a long age, will be remembered as one who kept faith with the faithless Carthaginians, shining in his first bloom—alas, by his father's auspices he had entered upon the Punic wars, and his wretched mother and his sweet household gods he was seeking again with sad lot, wounded. No comrade of his survived, and none to bring help to his black wounds: through trackless ways, leaning on his broken spear and snatched away by the stealth of the dark night, he was bearing his silent journey into the Perusine fields. Here, wearied, whatever fates might be given him there, he was knocking at the threshold of a small dwelling, when Marus, unrolling his limbs from the couch, not slow (he was an old soldier of the father, and had handled battles, no deaf to fame), comes forth, the lights renewed at the hearth and at the poor Vesta, holding out his lamp. And when he recognized the face and the man sick with dread wounds and—pitiable to see— his slipping steps propped on the broken-off shaft, his ears already wounded by the rumour of the deadly evil: "What crime do I behold, O born to too much life and too much to bear adversity? You, greatest of leaders, I saw, when with your captive face you terrified the citadel of Carthage, the reproach and the fault of the Thunderer, fall, and I drank in a grief that not even the Sidonian dwellings, overthrown, could drive from my heart. Where are you, gods, see, again? Regulus gives his breast to the iron, and perjured Carthage cuts down the rising stock of so great a house." Then he lays the sick limbs on the couch, and, no novice to bear medicines (for he was practised in wars), now cleanses the wounds with water, now soothes them with juices. Then he binds them, and wraps the wool with gentle touch, and softens the numbed limbs. Then the old man's care is to drive off from the weary man's sad mouth its thirst and to summon his strength with a frugal table. And after these were hastened, sleep at last applies its gifts and pours gentle rest through his limbs. And before the day had risen, Marus presses on the wound's burning: to heal by tried methods, and, having put off his old age, he ministers the welcome warmth with anxious devotion.

Here the youth, lifting his sad face to the stars with a groan and tears at once: "If, not yet hating the Tarpeian heights, you have not condemned the sceptre of Quirinus, look on the last fortunes of the Italians and on Ausonia falling," he says, "father, and at last turn upon the Trojan storms your equal eyes. We have lost the Alps, nor since then is there a limit to our disasters: Ticinus, and Eridanus black with carnage, and you, marked by Sidonian trophies, Trebia, and the tearful land of Arnus. But why do I tell these things? How much heavier, see, the force of evils! I saw the waters of Trasimene swelling with slaughters, and I saw Flaminius falling amid the weapons, the prostrate mass of men. I call to witness, my deities, the shades, that I sought a death worthy then of my father's nobility by the slaughter of the foe, had not the sad fates denied us death, as once they denied it to my father." The old man, striving to soothe by his words the rest of his lament as he heaped it up, speaks out: "By our fathers' custom, bravest one, let us bear whatever hardship is at hand and the bowed-down state of things. By the law of the gods, on the steep path of life, through varied chances the wheel of the age rolls headlong. Enough for you, enough great and published through all the world stand the proofs of your house: that sacred man, inferior to no deity, that father of yours, won high glories by standing against adversity, nor put off any valour before his breath left his struggling limbs. My age had scarcely completed my boyish time, when Regulus in his first years was marking his cheeks with down. I joined him as comrade, and we made allies of all our years, until it seemed good to the gods to extinguish the light of the Italian race, in whose noble breast nurturing Faith had taken her seat and, embracing his mind, held it. He gave us this sword as the equal of great honours and as a reward of valour, and—what you now see grimed with smoke— the bridle (but there is a silver gleam upon them). Nor after such gifts was Marus, as a knight, not set before any man. But the spear surpassed all my honours. Why you see me pour to it the liquids of Lyaeus, it is worth your while to learn the cause.

Turbid, with slow pace, the Bagrada furrows the dry sands, by no river in the Libyan bounds surpassed in spreading its muddy waters more widely and enfolding the open fields with its stagnant shallow. Here, in our zeal for water, of which the land is not lavish, glad we settled along the banks in the savage fields. A sluggish grove nearby, with pale shades, kept a Stygian wood without sun, and a thick breath, bursting through the air, breathed out a foul odour. Within, a dreadful house, and in a curved monstrous cave beneath the earth, a hollow, and sad darkness without light. The horror returns to my mind. A deadly monster, born of the wrath of the earth, whose like scarcely any age of men shall have seen, a serpent, stretched out a hundred cubits long, inhabited the deadly bank and the Avernian groves. The maw of its immense belly and its paunch heavy with venom it sated with captured lions at the spring, or with the herds driven to the river by the sun's burning torch, and with birds drawn through the air by the foul oppression and felled by its breath of corruption. Half-eaten bones lay on the ground, a foul feast, with which, gorged and savage, the flocks laid waste, it had belched in its black cave. And when it had soothed the kindled fires of its glowing feast with the swift flood and the foaming waves, not yet even sunk with its whole body in the river, it would already lay its head on the margin of the opposite bank. Unaware of so great a pest, I was walking, Aquinus the Apennine-dweller and Umbrian Avens my companions: to know the grove and to explore the look of the place was our pleasure. And now, as we drew near, a silent horror penetrated our limbs, and our members stiffened with a hidden cold. Yet we enter, and we pray to the Nymphs and the deity of the unknown flood, and our trembling steps, fearing much, we dare to entrust to the secret grove. Behold, from the entrance and the first jaws of the cave, a Tartarean whirlwind and a breath fiercer than the mad East Wind bursts forth, and from the vast gulf, poured out, a storm arises, whirling a tempest mingled with a hiss like Cerberus'. Terrified by the calamity, in turn we look at one another. The ground resounds, and the earth is moved, and the cave falls in, and the shades seem to advance. With how great serpents the Giants in arms sought heaven, or how great the serpent that wearied the son of Amphitryon in the waves of Lerna, and such as the Junonian snake that guarded the boughs leafy with gold: so great, the earth scattered, beneath the stars its gleaming head, rising, it lifted, and into the clouds first scattered its gore, and befouled the sky with its gape. We fled apart, and, panting, in fear we try to raise a thin cry in vain: for hisses filled the whole grove. But, blind with sudden dread and to be condemned for the deed, Avens (but the fates were dragging him) hid himself in the huge bulk of an ancient oak, if he could escape the unspeakable monster. Scarcely do I myself believe it: with its tightly encircling coils it tore away the mass of the tree, and, wrenched up from the depths, it overturned it from its base and dug it out by its lowest roots. Then him, trembling and calling his comrades with his last voice, it seizes, and, swallowing him in a gulp and in its black jaws (I saw it, looking back), it buried him in its obscene belly. The unhappy Aquinus had trusted himself to the river and the rushing waves, and was now swimming in swift flight. Him it attacked in the midst of the flood, and his limbs, brought back to the bank (alas, an unspeakable kind of death!), it devours.

Thus to me it was granted to escape the dire and lamentable monster. As far as my sick mind allowed, I hasten my step and disclose each thing to the leader. He groaned, pitying the bitter chances of the young men. And as he was fiery for battles and Mars and combats and the foe, and burned with a great love of daring, he bids the arms be seized more swiftly, and the cavalry, proved in every Mars, go upon the fields. He himself rushes, his swift steed goaded by the heel, and at his command the shielded band swiftly follows, and bears the heavy wall-engines, the ballistas, and the spear of immense point, accustomed to move the lofty towers. And now, when the horned hoof, ringing round the deadly hall with its noise, leaps over the grassy field, the serpent, roused by the neighing, rolls out of its cave and hisses out Stygian heats from its smoking mouth: a terrible fire flashes from its twin eyes. But its erect crest overtops the grove and the tall treetops of the wood: its tongue, brandished through the air with threefold motion, flickers, and leaping up licks the sky. But when in truth the trumpets sounded, terrified, on high it lifts its immense body, and, settling on its back, gathers the rest beneath its breast in winding coils. Then into dread war it rushes, and, swiftly unwinding its twisted circles, with straight body the whole mass it extends, and suddenly, near, into the faces of those at a broad distance it comes. Every horse pants, stunned at the serpent, and impatient to be held by the bridle breathes frequent fires from its nostrils. That one, towering above on its swollen neck, nods its head on high to either side. Then, the trembling men, urged on by wrath, now it snatches aloft, now it rejoices to have crushed with its vast weight, pressing them down. Then, their bones broken, the black gore it swallows, and, corruption flowing through its mouth, gaping it changes its foe and leaves their half-eaten limbs. The standards were now giving way backward, and the victor pressed the bands carried farther off, blasting them with its plague, when the leader, swiftly driving the squadron, recalled to battle, urging it on with his words: "Do we, an Italian people, give our backs to a serpent, and confess that Ausonia is no match for Libyan snakes? If an idle breath has conquered us, and our sick mind has flowed away at the sight of its gape, I will go, eager and alone, and will suffice to join hands with the monster." Crying this and undaunted, his spear, swift, he hurls through the void with his lightning arm. It came into the facing brow in no idle whirlwind, the point, and, aided not a little by the strength of the beast rushing on with its ardour against it, settled quivering in the head. A shout is given to the stars, and voices suddenly poured out reached the airy halls. At once the earth-born thing rages with wrath, impatient to give its back, and new to grief, and then for the first time in a long age having suffered steel. Nor in vain would the swift onset have been, the grief goading, had not Regulus, by the art of guiding, his horse drawn aside, eluded it as it pressed, and again, the steed following its circles, by the curve of his bent back, the reins turned aside, swiftly with his left hand escaped. But Marus was no idle spectator amid such things, sluggish in his right hand. My spear was the second in the monster's so great body. And now, and now, with its forked tongue it licked the back of the steed, weary with the contest: I hurled my weapon, and swiftly the savage serpent's battles, pressing on me, I turned upon myself. Then the cohort, imitating me, in rivalry heaps javelins with their right hands, and draws the beast into wrath now this way, now that, until the wall-ballista checked it with its blow. Then at last its strength was broken; nor any longer did its sick spine furnish its accustomed rigour to its efforts, nor its head be lifted, as before, into the clouds—they press more keenly. And now the missile, sunk deep within its belly, settled, and swift arrows snatched away its twin eyes. Now from the wide jaws beneath the vast wound the black cavern breathes out its corrupting gore. And now its last tail, with the javelins cast and the weight of the pole, clings to the ground, yet threatens still with its weary gape, until the beam, driven by the engines, shrieking and with a great crash, shattered its head, and, loosening itself along the long mound of the bank, at last it breathed out into the air a livid mist of venom from its fleeing mouth. A bellowing burst from the sad river, and murmurs poured from the lowest shallows, and suddenly both the grove and the cave and the banks, echoing in the woods, howled mournfully. Alas, with how great losses we soon paid for the sad battle, and how great punishments and what wraths we drained! Nor were the pious seers silent: that we had violated by our hands a servant of the sister Naiads, whom the warm Bagrada nurtures in its wave, they warned us by late perils. This spear was then to us the glory and the prize of the second wound, granted by your father, Serranus, which first drank the blood from the sacred serpent."

For a while now Serranus had been wetting his face with tears and his cheeks, and in the middle of the man's speech he says: "If life had lasted for this leader into our age, the Trebia would not have surpassed its ill-omened banks with blood, nor, Trasimene, would your flood press down so many names." Then the old man: "Great penalties from the Tyrian blood he exacted, and the forestalled atonements of his death. For Africa, drained of men and worn down in her resources, stretched out her upturned palms, when under a dire star spirited Therapne sent a leader to the sons of Agenor. No beauty had the man, and his body lacked grace and a noble front; but in his small limbs his vigour was lively—a wonder—and in effort one to surpass great frames. Now to govern war and to join cunning to the sword and to lead a life easy amid hardships through inhospitable places— not to that one, in whose hands now is the skill of war, would he yield, to Hannibal. Would, O Taygetus sad to us, that you had not hardened this one, this alone, on the shady banks of Eurotas. I would have seen the walls of the Phoenician city fall in flames, or at least I would not have wept the dreadful fates of my leader, and the griefs which, freed by no death nor fire, keeping them, I shall carry into Tartarus. The lines were joined on the fields, and much through the ploughlands Mars seethed, nor was any mind without wrath. Here amid the midst, with deeds to be remembered, Regulus opened the field with the sword and rushed into dangers, and gave no wounds with his deadly right hand that needed to be repeated. So, when a whirlwind, whirling a black globe with shrieking South Winds, carries it, and from a pitch-black cloud threatens ruin hanging over the lands and the sea alike, every farmer and every shepherd on the wooded height and on the sea the sailor trembles, his sails drawn down. But weaving a deceit, where hollow rocks shut in his comrades, the Greek leader suddenly turned the contest and swiftly gives his back in feigned dread, just as a shepherd, providing leisure for his stalls, leads by night the wolves into a pit covered with a thin veil of foliage, by the bleatings of a lamb set there. The glory, torch of an honourable mind, seized and dragged the man, and the deceiving trust in uncertain Mars. He looked not back at his comrades or the bands of his companions, nor at the arms of those following: with a mad love of battle he was now pressing on alone, when suddenly a dense cloud of Laconians from the rocky lurking-places, bent on battle, was poured around, and behind rose the savage might of the men. O day dire to Latium, and a disgrace, Gradivus, to be marked on your calendars! For you and for your city his right hand was born, condemned by sad lot to the chain. Never will I cease from groaning. You, Regulus, the Sidonian prison saw, and you, Carthage, seemed to the gods great enough for this triumph. What punishment, worthy enough, shall follow the Laconians defiled by such warfare?

But the Elissaean fathers, sworn, deliberate to entrust new pacts to their leader, and to send a go-between of peace, demanding the youth bound amid the battles and the captive band to be repaid for our leader. No delay, now there stood in the first waves of the shore a ship pushed off from the dockyard, now the nautical youth either strip oars from the woods, or, the fir cut, renew the thwarts. To these the care to fit the twisted ropes, to those to set the sails on the upright mast. At the curved prow they place the weights of bent iron. Before all, skilled in the sea and helmsman of the keel, Cothon fits the stern and the rudder. The bronze gleam flashes on the deep water of the three-forked beak shining on the sea. They bring weapons too, and against the harshness of the deep varied aid for the moment's need. On the margin of the mid-stern stands one who with his voice may temper the alternate strokes of the sailors and dictate the rhythm to the oars, and likewise, as they are drawn back to the count, applaud the resounding blue with the blades.

After the work was done by the sailors, and the hour gave the course, and the armed ship and the winds gave the deep, all the crowd rushes—mothers and boys and old men. Through the midst of the assemblies and through hostile faces Fortune drags the leader to be gazed at. He bears his eyes against them, his brow at peace, just as when first he reached the Sidonian shores, the helmsman, his fleet brought in. I joined him as comrade, he himself not refusing, and, placed on the ship, I add myself as ally to his sad chances. Filth, and poor tables, and a hard couch, and to contend with pressing evils he thought greater than the foe conquered, nor so noble to have fled adversity by caution, as to have subdued it by enduring. Yet one hope was mine, though well known and long ago that grim faith of his—that if to the wretched it were allowed to touch the city and the walls and his home, the heart of the man could be moved and surely soften at your weeping. I shut up my fears in my heart, and thought there were tears in the man, and a mind like ours amid sad things. When at last we glide to the Tiber-stream of his native land, I kept watching the leader's face, and his eyes betraying his feeling, and I stood fixed, intent with the same gaze. If there is any faith, one, my boy, amid a thousand toils, one even in his native land and in the savage city of Agenor, and one even at the time of his punishment, did I see his face. Through all the cities at once Ausonia went out to meet the captive, and as the crowd overflowed the field, the nearby hills are filled; the Albula roars with its high banks. The Carthaginian nobles themselves strive to recall his pitiless heart to the customs of his fathers, and the honour of the toga was offered him. He stood, amid the weeping senate and the throng of mothers and the poured-out grief of the young men, amid so many groans, unmoved. On the mound the consul stretched out his right hand, and as he first set his footsteps on his native soil, honoured him with a friendly meeting. He drew in his step, and warned the consul to withdraw, and not to violate the highest honour. Hedged round by the proud throng of the Carthaginians and the captive column, he went, and bore his ill-will toward heaven and the gods.

Behold, dragging the twin pledge of her sons, Marcia, unhappy in the too great valour of her great husband, was tearing her squalid hair and her sad garments. Do you recognize the day? Or did it not cling to your tender years? And she, when she saw him near, in dress and in the Carthaginian covering, disfigured, with poured-out wailings, sick, she swoons, and the colour of death seizes her cold limbs. If there is any piety in the gods, may they grant you, Carthage, to see such Sidonian mothers. With quiet voice the father, addressing me, bids me ward off both your embraces and his wife's alike, that one impenetrable to griefs and never bowing his neck to sorrow."

Here the youth, with deep groan and tears arising: "Great father," he said, "than whom no greater deity sits for us even on the Tarpeian citadel, if rights are granted to pious complaints, why did you deny this comfort to my mother and to me, or why, O hard one, did you deny this honour— to touch your hallowed face and to have sipped kisses from your mouth? To grasp your right hand with my right hand was not allowed me? How much lighter would these wounds be, if it were granted to carry to the shades your embraces, venerable one, fixed in my mind. But I recall in vain, unless, Marus (for then we clung together in my first years), his appearance was greater than human. Bristling, descending from his white crown, his hair covered his huge neck, and on his brow, with squalid locks, sat a terrible grace and the venerable weight of his mind. Nothing since has met my eyes like it." Then Marus takes up, and, restraining him from tearing his wounds with lament: "What," he says, "when, his household gods passed by, the hated lodgings and the bitter seats of the Carthaginians he entered? The shields fixed up, and the chariot, and the well-known darts in his small house, the monuments of a great triumph, beat upon his eyes, and his wife on the very threshold cried out: 'Where do you bear your steps? This is no Punic prison, Regulus, that you should flee. The traces of our chaste couch the house keeps, and unstained the ancestral hearth without reproach. Here once and again (what, I pray, of ours has been defiled?) offspring, the senate and the homeland congratulating, I bore for you. This, look, is your dwelling, whence, huge, with shoulders shining with purple, you saw, as consul, the Latin fasces go forth, whence you used to go to war, whither you used to bring back the captured spoils and as victor hang up the arms with me upon the doorposts. I do not seek embraces and the bonds of the sacred marriage-torch, or wedlock: cease to condemn your ancestral household gods, and think it right to grant a night to your children.' Amid these tears, his footsteps joined to the Carthaginians, he shut himself in at the Tyrian threshold and left her complaints. Scarce yet did the bright day survey on the top of Oeta the monuments of the Herculean pyre, when the consul bids the Libyans approach and be summoned. Then the temple's threshold we saw him entering. What the senate deliberated, or what words of the man the mourning curia at the last heard, he himself disclosed to us with calm mouth. As he set his steps within, in rivalry with voice and hand they called him to his accustomed seat and the well-known place. He refused, and scorned the ancient honour of the place. But the men, pouring round on every side, no less his right hand sought to grasp, and begged that he give the leader back to his country, by so great a name: that the captive throng could be weighed in his ransom, and that then more justly the Tyrian citadels would burn by that hand which had been bound in chains. Then, lifting his palms and his eyes alike to heaven: 'Giver of justice and right, you who govern all things, and you, no lighter deity to me, Faith, and Sarranian Juno, whom I called to witness my return with a sworn mind, let it be right for me to speak things worthy of myself and to guard the Latin hearths with my voice: I will go to the Tyrians no more sluggish,' he said, 'my faith of return standing and the pact of punishment safe. So cease for me, in the ruin of our affairs, to stretch out honour. By so many wars and so many years we have broken our age. Now too, with chains and a long prison, my strength grows numb in captive old age. He was, and never, while he was, did Regulus rest from the hard service of Mars. You behold a name in a bloodless body. But Carthage, the house of frauds, not ignorant how much of us remains, prepares young men, breasts harsh with the sword, to weigh out the captives against our old age. Go against their wiles, and let the nation, glad to deceive by cunning, learn how much, I being taken, remains to you, Rome. Nor indeed let any peace please, but such as is by the custom of our fathers. The Libyans demand, and gave us these things to report, that, if it please to weigh the war by an equal pact and on fair terms to enroll twin laws. But let me have entered the Stygian household gods before I see the Latins striking such pacts.' Having said these things, he gave himself back now to the Tyrian wrath, and, the grave and faithful warnings not scorned by the senate, the cohort of the Carthaginians was dismissed. It, sad at the repulse and threatening the captive, hastened to its native shores. The crowd, the fathers, follow him, and the field resounds greatly with beatings of the breast and grief. It was their wish to recall him at times and to keep the man snatched away by just sorrow. But his trembling wife, as if standing at a funeral suddenly, when she saw him hastening to enter the ship, with a fearful outcry brought her swift step back to the waves: 'Take me, Libyans, as companion of his punishment and death. This one thing, husband, by the pledges of our womb, this one thing I beg: let it be allowed me, bearing with you whatever toils of lands and sea and sky, to suffer them. I did not send the Amyclaean leader into battle, nor are your chains thrown round his neck by us. Why do you flee a wretched woman all the way to the Carthaginians? Take with me this offspring. Perhaps we shall bend the hard wraths of Carthage with our tears, or, if the hostile city closes its ears, then the same hour shall await you and yours alike, or, if it is fixed to break off life, let us die in our native land. I am here, the last companion of your fate.' Amid these words, the ship, loosed from its bonds, began little by little to move and to depart from the bank. Then indeed the unhappy woman, her mind maddened with grief, cries out, stretching her weary palms toward the shore: 'See, the man who boasts that to Libya and to the wicked peoples and to the foe he keeps faith. Where now, faithless one, are the pacts given to us and the faith promised to our marriage-bed?' This last word then penetrated to the hard ears; the rest the struck oars forbade him to know.

Then swiftly from the river we glide down to the shores of the sea, and we skirt the deep, and with the pine hollowed out we cleave the huge expanse and the immense waves with our curved keel. Shuddering at the mockery of his death, I prayed that the harsh might of the sea might overwhelm us, and that the wicked frenzy of the East Wind might break the ship on the rocks: that death would have been a common one. But to our punishment the gentle Zephyrs, with measured breath, carried us, and gave us to the Tyrian frenzy.

Unhappy, I saw it, and, sent back to my native city, the teller of his punishment, I returned at a hard price. Nor would I now attempt to set forth to you the Pygmalionean race, imitating the rites and wraths of beasts, if the race of men had seen anything greater in the whole world than what the venerable valour of your father brought forth as an example. I am ashamed to add complaints to the tortures which I watched him bearing with calm face. You too, dear boy, cease not to fashion yourself worthy of so great a blood, and check your rising tears. With wood set before them, with matching points, all the wickerwork of the sides is armed, and densely by art is woven, of upright and standing iron in rows, an unhappy goad, and, sleep denied him by this device, wherever, with the time drawn out, sluggish torpor inclined his bent body, they pierce the flesh to the vitals. Cease, O youth, from tears. This endurance surpasses all triumphal cars. In a long age his glory will grow green again; while chaste Faith holds the seat of heaven and the lands, while the venerable name of valour endures, he will live; and a day will come on which, glorious leader, your fates those after you will shudder to hear, by you trodden under foot."

These things Marus, and with sad care he tended again the wounds. Meanwhile, her swift wings drenched with blood, as she had dyed them in the bloody wave of Trasimene, Rumour scattered things true and feigned alike through the City. The Allia and the unspeakable Senones and the captured citadel's face recur to the stunned minds. Grief-bringing Panic shook off the reins, and the storm was increased by their fear. This man rushes headlong to the walls: a horrid voice is borne, "The foe is at hand," and they cast stakes and idle weapons. But other women, growing hoary with torn hair, sweep the high temples of the gods and, late after the deaths of their own, trouble them with prayers. Rest, both the darkness and the day have lost: there lie at the gates, scattered with howling grief, the crowd, and of those returning in a long order the throng watches their steps. They hang on the mouth of the speakers, nor have the glad enough sure faith, and again they delay by asking, and, sometimes praying with their face without voice, they are afraid to hear what they ask. Hence weeping, when ears are struck by a heavier evil, hence fear, if it is denied to know, and the doubtful messenger of the answer holds back. And now, when in near view the bodies of the returning were seen, anxiously glad they pour forth, and on the very wounds they fix kisses and weary the gods above.

Here amid the trembling, venerable in his care, was leading Serranus Marus, and Marcia, who once after her husband's death had not gone out from her house, shunning company, and had endured the light for her children's sake, was rushing into a grief like the ancient one. Suddenly troubled and recognizing Marus: "Glorious companion of great Faith, this one at least you give back to me," she says. "A light wound? Or has the savage point penetrated deep, all the way to our vitals? Whatever it is, so long as Carthage does not snatch him, bound in chains, and renew the monstrous things of his father's punishment, it is welcome, O gods. How often, alas, my son, did I beg that you should not bear your father's wraths and spirit into battle, nor that the sad glory of your warlike father should goad you into arms. The hard punishments of too long a life, of my too long old age, I have paid out. I beg you, now spare, if any deities have fought for us." But, the bitter disaster scattered as if a cloud, the fathers now plan to seek for the weary state help, and there is striving toward the duties of war, and fear is driven off by a graver peril. The greatest of cares was to set a guide over the camp, on whom Latium and the shaken mass of affairs might rest, as the homeland watched its own downfall. That was Jupiter's care—to prolong the time for falling Ausonia and the Italian realms; for the Tyrrhenians and the Carthaginian, swollen with successes, rising on the Alban citadel he had looked back upon, who was preparing to bear his victorious standards against the walls. Then, shaking his head: "Never to you, Jupiter," he says, "O youth, will he grant to cross the gates of Rome and to set your foot within. To strew the Tyrrhenian valleys with slaughters, and to make the rivers' banks overflow with Latin blood, may be right: to approach the Tarpeian hill and to draw near the walls I forbid." Then four times the gleaming thunderbolt he hurled with his right hand, by which all the land of the Maeonians shone again, and, rolling a black cloud through the air, the sky burst open, he shattered it above the columns. Nor was it enough to have turned the Carthaginian back: he gives, with great power, to the sons of Aeneas the mind to lay in a safe bosom the Roman glory, and to entrust the reins of safety to Fabius as their leader. To whom, after he sees the rights of war handed over: "Him never," he says, "shall envy overcome, or popular glory with its flattering dye, no deceitful cunning, no plunder or any other lust. Old in warfare, and with a calm mind able to bear praises and disasters. His genius is equal to the camp and the toga." So the father of the gods, and brings his step back to the stars.

Here, caught in no arms, surveyed by all, and praised by Jupiter, Fabius, wondrously how much he rejoiced, returning, to count back to his homeland the youth which, setting out, he had led with him into battle. Nor did anyone spare his own limbs or his beloved son more keenly, or see with sadder eyes a comrade's blood in war. And that same man, the victor drenched with the foe's blood, sought again the walls with his camp full. A race famous in its stock, and an origin akin to heaven. For long ago the Tirynthian, returning from distant shores, and the fame of the threefold monster and, a sight to wonder at, the captured cattle, drove in triumph here, where the walls of Rome now gleam. Then the Arcadian, so the story goes, was laying out, the Palatium founded among the deserted thickets, the leader, with a poor people, when the royal maiden, overcome by her sacred guest, bore Fabius from a glad crime and mingled the rise of a great seed, an Arcadian mother destined to be among the Herculean descendants. This house armed three hundred Fabii against the foe, gone forth from one threshold; whose fairest deeds Fabius surpassed by delaying, and the leader Hannibal by matching him. So great then, Carthaginian, were you.

While the stricken Latins renew themselves for the wars, troubled by Jupiter and stripped of the hope of battering the walls of Rome, Hannibal made for the Umbrian hills and the fields, where, on the high summit of the topmost mountain, Tuder hangs sloping down its side, and where, thrown out on the broad plains, Mevania breathes out sluggish fogs and sits feeding a huge bull, a gift for Jupiter. Then he pours himself into the Palladian fields of Picenum, rich in plunder, and with roving arms, where spoils invite him, he transfers his ravaging standards, until gentle Campania slowed his pestilent courses and, undefended, received the war into her bosom.

Here, while the leader gazes at the temple and the houses of marshy Liternum, he beholds, gleaming with varied painting, the monuments of a former war fought out by the fathers: for, marked on the porticoes, there remained a long and notable order of events. First, with grim face, Regulus was urging wars, wars to be denied the man, had it been granted to know the fates. But Appius stood as the foremost, war declared against the Carthaginians by the custom of the fathers, and, bound with laurel, he led a just triumph from the Sarranian slaughter. Beside it, a glory of the sea and a naval trophy, a column, bearing beaks, rose in a snow-white mass. The spoils to Mars, and as an offering, Duilius dedicated, the deep fleet of the Carthaginians sunk before all. For him, a nocturnal honour, bright torches and the sacred piper attends after the feasts, and the chaste household gods, distinguished, he sought again with the murmur of glad song. He sees too the last honours of a dead citizen: Scipio was celebrating the funeral of the Carthaginian leader, victor in the Sardinian land. He sees thence the youth rushing on the Libyan shores through their scattered bands; Regulus pressed on, his crest gleaming, and crowded their backs: the Autololians and Numidians and the Moor and Hammon and the Garamantian, their weapons laid down, surrendered their towns. Sluggish on the sandy field the Bagrada foamed with viperous gore, and against the threatening squadrons of its own accord the serpent fought, and waged war with the leader. And besides, cast from the ship and calling in vain on the gods, the Amyclaean helmsman the treacherous hand was sinking in the sea, and late penalties to you, Regulus, Xanthippus was paying by a death deserved on the deep. They had added the twin Aegates rising in the mid-flood: around you might see the fragments of a shattered fleet, and the Carthaginians poured out, floating in the gulf. The possessor of the sea, and with the breeze before him, Lutatius, the victor, was driving the captive ships to the shore. Among these, bound in the joined order, Hamilcar, the father of the leader, drew upon himself, from the image of all things, the faces of all the crowd. But one could see the face of Peace, and the polluted altars of the treaty, and Jupiter deceived, and the Latins dictating laws. The Libyan, with trembling neck, dreaded the drawn axes, and, with palms lowered in order, begging pardon, they swore the pacts in vain. This, from the top of Eryx, Dione watched with joy.

When the Carthaginian had reviewed all these with hostile face, smiling, he proclaims from his slow wrath: "You shall give no lighter deeds of my right hand to inscribe on our roofs: Saguntum captured, Carthage, grant me to gaze on, falling at once by flame and sword; let the fathers pierce through the limbs of their sons. Nor shall a small place hold the conquered Alps: let the victor leap over the steep ridges with his lofty horses, the Garamantian and the Numidian. You shall add the banks of Ticinus foaming with blood, and our Trebia, and the shores of Tuscan Trasimene choked with corpses. Let Flaminius fall, huge in body and arms; let the consul Scipio flee with flowing blood and be carried to his allies on his son's neck. These send among the peoples, and still greater things shall be given. You shall fashion Rome blazing, Carthage, with Libyan torches, and the Thunderer cast down from the Tarpeian rock. Meanwhile you, as is fitting, these (go more swiftly), O young men, by whose right hands such great things are done for me, give to ashes these monuments, and wrap them in flames."