Book 9

9. Latium being troubled by portents, and the gods revealing through Ausonia the unavailing signs of the disaster to come, no otherwise than if the omens of the battle to come were favourable and prosperous, the consul passed the night sleepless and brandished his weapon in his hand through the shadows, and now upbraided Paulus for sloth, now made the keen trumpets sound and longed for the war-call of the night. Nor was the ardour for a hasty contest less in the Carthaginian. They burst from the rampart, the sinister Fortune urging them on, and hands were joined. For the Macae, scattered through the neighbouring fields to snatch up fodder, poured forth a flying cloud of weapons. Foremost of all to invade the war, Mancinus, glad, and first to dye his weapons with the enemy's blood, falls, and the numerous youth falls. Nor would Varro have curbed the arms, with the god rebuking him by the entrails of the beasts and the auspices opposed to Paulus, had not the lot of the alternate command, by which the camp is ruled, denied to him, hastening to his fate, the decision of battle. Yet this availed to grant to the thousands that were to perish no more than a single day. They returned to the camp, while Paulus groaned without doubt, who saw that tomorrow's authority would yield to the madman, and that in vain his men's lives had been preserved from slaughter. For, turbid with anger and hostile to delay because of the battle put off, the leader: 'Is it thus, thus,' he said, 'Paulus, that you repay thanks and reward for your own life? Did they deserve such things, who tore you from the laws and the urn that menaced you with doom? Nay, let them at once hand over to the enemy their recalled swords, let them hand over their arms, command it, or strip them from the right hands of those who fight. But you, whose eyes and faces I saw wet, when the consul bade you turn your backs and return, wait not for the wonted signal of battle to be sought. Let each, his own leader, snatch his way, when Phoebus shall begin to sprinkle with his first rays the Gargan summits. I myself will open the gates in haste. Rush more swiftly, and recall this day that was snatched from you.' So, turbid, he set the sick camp ablaze with a deadly love of battle.

But Paulus, now no longer the same in mind or face, but such as he stood after the battle, on plains strewn with the soldiery destroyed, with the coming evil hovering before his eyes and face, as when, the hope of light now taken away, a lifeless mother is stunned and warms in vain with last embraces the limbs of her son still warm: 'By the walls of Rome so often shaken,' he said, 'and by these innocent souls, around which the night now flies with its Stygian shade, spare to go against the disaster. While the gods' frenzy passes and the anger of Fortune is spent, the strangeness of Hannibal is enough, if the soldier learns to bear the name, and looks on the foe without growing cold. Do you not see, when he is heard of in the neighbouring fields, how suddenly the blood leaves the pale bodies, and how the arms fall before the trumpets? The delayer and, as you think, the feeble Fabius, however many he led into battle beneath those censured standards, now they take up arms. But those whom Flaminius—but the gods avert the dire omen. But if your spirit fights against our warnings and prayers, open your ears to the god. The Cumaean prophetess sang these things once through the world, and, foretelling, made known to the lands your frenzies and yours, in the age of our forefathers. And now a second prophet to you, in no riddling song, before your face I sing the fates: if you do not halt tomorrow's standards, you will confirm with our blood the words of the Phoebean Sibyl. Nor hereafter shall the fields be made famous by Greek Diomedes, but, if you persist, by you the consul.' So Paulus, and tears rose in his burning eyes.

The night too a wicked error defiled. Satricus, captured by Xanthippus, had endured slavery on the Libyan shores, and soon among the prizes was given as a gift to the king of the Autololes for the honour of his valour. He had a home and twin sons, left behind at Sulmo at their mother's breast, Mancinus and, together, Solimus of Rhoetean name. For his stock was Dardanian and his race from a Phrygian forefather, who, following the sceptre of Aeneas, had founded a city famous for its walls, called Solimon after himself. Soon, celebrated by the Italian colonists, by degrees the name worn down to Sulmo. But then Satricus, brought with the king amid barbarian troops, who was not despised, if need required it, to teach the Gaetulians Latin words as interpreter, after it was granted him that he might revisit his Pelignian dwelling and hope for his native hearth, calls the night to his attempt and stealthily escapes from the unkind camp. But the man's flight was bare. For, taking up a shield, he avoided betraying his enterprise, and was returning with his right hand unarmed. The spoils therefore and the bodies laid low on the field he searches, and girds himself with the stripped arms of Mancinus. And now his fear was lighter. But he from whom he bore the spoils torn from the lifeless one, and whose limbs he had stripped, was his own son, laid low a little before by the Macan foe.

Behold, at the coming of night and the first slumber, the other of his sons, Solimus, had carried his steps, wakeful, over the Ausonian rampart, while by lot in turn he changed the watches at the gate, and was seeking among the scattered dead the body of his brother Mancinus, laid low, desiring to lay the wretched one in stealthy earth. Nor had he hastened far on his way, when he sees the foe coming in arms toward the Sidonian mound, and, with what chance gave unforeseen in sudden straits, in the tomb of Aetolian Thoas he hides his concealed limbs. Then, when he sees no arms following more closely behind, and the man bearing his unaccompanied steps through the shadows, springing from the mound he hurls his bare javelin not in vain into his father's back, and Satricus, believing the band that followed to be Tyrian and the wounds Sidonian, trembling, looks about for the author of the blind blow. But when his course brought the victor near with youthful strength, and the grim light flashed from the familiar arms, and his brother's shield from afar, the moon betraying it, uncovered itself before his eyes and the boss gleamed close at hand, the youth cries out, set ablaze by sudden anger: 'May I not be your offspring, Satricus, born at Sulmo, nor your brother, Mancinus, and may I confess myself a descendant unworthy of Pergamean Solimus, if it be granted this man to escape my hands unpunished. Shall you bear the noble spoil of my brother before my eyes and carry back, treacherous, while I breathe, the proud arms of the Pelignian house? These gifts, dear mother Acca, for the comfort of your grief I will bring you, to fix forever on your son's tomb.' Crying out such things, with drawn sword he rushed on. But from the other now the weapons, now the arms slipped from his hand when he heard his country and his sons and his wife and the arms named, and a cold horror had stunned his limbs and his senses. Then a pitiable voice is poured from his half-dead mouth: 'Spare, I pray, your right hand—not that life may remain to me (for it is a sin to wish to enjoy this), but with our blood do not condemn your hands, O son. That captive of Carthage, now first brought to his native shores, I am that Satricus, of Solimus's stock. No guilt, my son, is yours. When you hurled the spear, hot, against me, I was a Carthaginian. But, escaped from the bitter camp, I was hastening to you and to the face of my dear wife: this shield I snatched from the lifeless one. But now, my only one, carry these arms, excused, back to your brother's tomb. Yet let it be your first care, son, to bear back to the leader Paulus the warning: let him strive to draw out the war and refuse the contests of Mars to the Carthaginian. He exults in the gods' augury and hopes for measureless slaughter in the near battle. I beg, restrain the raging Varro: for the report is that he urges on the standards. Great enough at this turning-point of my wretched life will be this solace, to have provided for my own. Now, son, give to a father found and lost at once the last kisses.' So speaking, he takes off his helmet and seizes the neck of his stiffened son with trembling arms: he labours to heal with words the shame of his son, stunned in mind, for the wound he has dealt, and to excuse the weapon: 'What witness, what accomplice was present at our deeds? Did not the night hide the error with its blackening shade? Why do you tremble? Give, son, give more, give me to join breast to breast. I, the father myself, absolve your hand, and at the end of my labours close my eyes with this right hand, I beg.' But the wretched youth, sighing from the depth of his breast, returns no words or response to the address, nor any voice, but hastens to stop the course of the black blood and, weeping, to bind more swiftly the deep wound with a torn covering. At last amid his groans the wretched laments broke forth: 'Is it thus, father, that Fortune brings you back to us in our country? Thus, impious, does she restore you to your son and your son to his father? O thrice and four times happy brother, to whom it was given by the fates to recognize his father lost. But I, unslain by the Sidonians, behold, by my father's wound recognize my father. Would that at least this, Fortune, had been a solace for my fault, that you had given me doubtful signs of my ill-omened race. But it shall be left to the unjust gods no longer to make our labours criminal.' While, distraught, he laments these things, now, the blood failing, the old man had scattered his life into the empty air. Then the youth, raising his sorrowful face to the stars: 'Witness, daughter of Titan, of my polluted right hand and of the unspeakable deed, who by your nocturnal light directed my weapons into my father's body, no longer,' he said, 'shall you be defiled by these eyes and their condemned sight.' This he says, and at once digs his sword into his breast and, holding up the black wound, with the flowing blood marks on the shield his father's charge: FLEE THE BATTLE, VARRO, and hangs the covering on the point of his uplifted spear and stretches his limbs over his lamented father.

Such omens of the battle to come the gods were sending to the Ausonians, and, the shades by degrees departing, the night, conscious of the crime, yielded to the rosy Dawn. The Libyan leader called his men to arms, and the Roman to arms called his after the custom, and for the Carthaginians there returned a day such as none had ever risen in all the ages.

'You have no need,' said the Carthaginian, 'of goading words, who from the Herculean pillars to the fields of Iapyx have measured the road by conquering. Nowhere is spirited Saguntum, the Alps have yielded, the very proud father of Ausonian waters, Eridanus, flows down in a captive channel. The Trebia is sunk with the slaughter of men, and the Lydian mouths are pressed by Flaminius's tomb, and far and wide the fields gleam with bones and are furrowed by no ploughshare. A more illustrious title and a light that will bring more blood rises. To me, greatness enough, indeed enough and more than enough be the reward of war: let the rest be conquered by you. Whatever Rome carried down from the rich Spaniard, whatever she paraded in her Aetnean triumphs, nay even whatever, snatched from the Libyan shore, she stored away, shall come to your swords without casting lots. Carry home what the right hand shall give. I, your leader, ask no honour from the spoils. Through the long ages the Dardanian plunderer shall have stripped for you the world that is now subdued. You who draw your Sarranian name from a Tyrian origin, whether the Laurentine land, furrowed by the Sigean farmer, smiles on you, or whether the Byzacian fields are dearer to your heart, sprouting with a hundred stalks for Ceres, I will grant you to choose select fields among the prizes. I will add too the banks which the Tiber waters with its yellow wave, to graze far and wide with captive flocks. But you who, an ally of foreign blood, move my standards of Byrsa, if you raise a right hand red with Ausonian slaughter, be from this moment a citizen of Carthage. And let not Garganus and the shores of Daunus deceive you: you stand at the walls of Rome. Though the trackless city is far off and stands distant from our contest, here today she falls, and beyond this I summon no soldier to battle: from the battle-line make your course to the Capitol.' This he says. Then, the defence of the rampart driven forward, they snatched away the delays of the ditches, and his battle-line he fits with skill to the place, in order, on the curving banks. On the left wing for the contest stood the barbarian warrior Nasamon, and with him the Marmarid, huger of limb, then the fierce Moor and the Garamantian and the Macae and the Massylian lines and the throng of the Adyrmachidae, glad to live by the sword, the people dwelling beside the Nile, keeping their bodies blackened by the excessive sun. Their head set over the columns and their command was Nealces. But on the right, where the Aufidus curves its wave with windings and wanders around its banks with curving eddy, Mago rules. The light troops came up whom bristling Pyrene sent, the peoples, and girded with varied tumult the river's side: the light-shielded youth gleams, the Cantabrian before the rest, and the Vasco, his temples uncovered, and the Balearic, mingling battles with whirled lead, and the men sprung from the Baetis. Lofty in the centre, he himself controls the columns, which he strengthened with native soldiery and which with the troops of the Celts, often steeped in the Eridanus. But where the river, with its waters slipping back, withdraws itself and walls the wedges with no defence, the beast, bearing on its black back turreted masses and bulwarks, like a moving mound, nods and lifts up its high walls to the air. The rest it is granted now to the Numidians, to fly around and bear their wandering courses and to seethe over the whole field.

While the Libyan, his soldiery kindled, dispenses his forces, and, insatiable, again and again by exhorting urges each man by his own deeds, and boasts that he knows from what right hand come the hissings of the shrieking weapon, and promises the men that he will fail none as witness, already Varro, the legion led out of the rampart, was setting in motion the beginnings of disaster, and, glad, the ferryman over the pale wave was making room for the shades to come. The foremost stand still, whom the bloody mark hanging on the shield forbade to go, and, fixed by the omen, they grow numb. Beside them a terrible sight: pitiable lay the bodies in an embrace, and the son, his right hand laid on his father's breast, covered the deadly wound. Tears flowed, and thence the grief of Mancinus, brought back in his brother's death, then the sad augury moved them, and the face, like a dead man's, on the lifeless body. Swiftly the fault of the error and the deeds to be lamented they unfold to the leader, and the arms forbidding battle. He, burning in spirit: 'Bear all this,' he said, 'to Paulus. For him, in whose womanish heart fears stand, that hand may move, which, steeped in unspeakable slaughter, when the Furies sought their penalties, perhaps with his father's blood, as he died, sealed the wicked verse.' Then, threatening, in haste he distributes the duties of battle, and where Nealces, savage, marshals the wild nations and his line, there he opposes himself with the Marsian soldiery and against the standards of the Samnites and the Iapygian nursling. But in the middle of the field (for in this part he saw the leader of Libya stand) Servilius is bidden to go to meet the arms and to lead on the Picentes and the Umbrians. The rest of the contests Paulus holds on the right wing. Above these, to go against the ambushes and the flying band of the Numidians is granted to the son of Scipio, and he foretells that the squadrons which by craft and tricks will split themselves he is to scatter the war among.

And now the battle-lines drew near, and with the nimble running of men and with mouths made hot at once by the mingled neighing of the hoofed beasts and the much-clashing arms a blind murmur wandered through the troubled columns. So, when the winds first stir contests on the sea, the wave of the strait brings to birth the rage shut within and the storms that will scatter the stars, and, moved from its depths, breathes through the rocks the threatening sounds, and, driven from its caverns, whirls the panting sea with foaming eddy. Nor indeed was that toil, in so savage a whirlwind of fate, of the lands alone. Mad discord entered heaven and forced the gods to war. On this side Mavors, on this Apollo, the companion of Gradivus, and the tamer of the swollen sea fights, on this Venus, distraught, on this Vesta and, stirred by the slaughter of captured Saguntum, the son of Amphitryon, and likewise venerable Cybele and the Indigetes gods and Faunus and the founder Quirinus and Pollux, alternating his soul with Castor exchanged. Against them, her side girt with iron, Saturnian Juno and Pallas, born of the Tritonian's Libyan waters, and ancestral Hammon, his horns bent over his temples, and a great throng besides of the lesser gods. When at the mass of them coming together and at their steps the kindly earth trembled, part filled the neighbouring mountains, divided, part took their seat beneath a high cloud: the descent to battle was made through the empty sky.

A measureless shout is raised to the deserted stars, as great as the voices the earth-born army poured to the air on the Phlegraean plains, or as the new thunderbolts Jupiter, the sower of the ages, demanded of the Cyclopes with great voice, when he saw the great-souled Giants go, with mountains heaped up, to seize the heavenly realms. Nor indeed in such great clashes was there any first spear: a shrieking cloud, with the rage of weapons contending, was poured forth at once, and the souls, greedy of blood, fell on this side and that in a twin storm. And before the mad sword is drawn by the right hand, a great part of the fighters lies low. Over the very bodies of their own they stand, eager, and trample on the groaning. And no more can the Dardanian manhood be thrust forth or turned away by the Libyan effort, nor can the Sarranian band, fixed in its rank, be driven, than if the sea should begin to tear Calpe from its seat with its hurled flood. They have lost the room for a blow, nor, with death accomplished, can they fall, hemmed in. The helmet, grim, blazes at the clash of the opposing helmet, and the shield gapes at the push of a shield, and sword is bruised by sword. Foot is worn by foot, and man by man, and the earth cannot be seen, covered with blood, and a dense night, hanging beneath the air with weapons heaped on, took away the sky and the stars. Those whom Fortune had granted to stand in a favourable place with the long blow of the pike and the tall point, as if they drove the front lines, mingle their contests. But those whom an inglorious rank holds behind, strive with missiles to equal the battles of those before them. Beyond, the shout drives the war, and the soldier, lacking the Mars he longs for, urges on the foe with savage cries. No kind of weapon is wanting. These rouse battles with the stake, these with the blazing pine, these with the weight of the javelin, but another with stones and the sling and the flying dart. At times the shrieking reed is borne through the clouds, at times the firebrand-spear, to be feared by the very walls.

Do we hope, goddesses, whose sacred rites are tended by me, that we can open out this whole day, with a mortal voice, to the ages? Do you grant me so much to trust to my tongue that I should sound Cannae with one mouth? If our glory pleases you and you do not turn away from great daring, hither summon all song and Phoebus the father. But would, henceforth, Roman, that you might bear favouring fortune in such spirit as you now bear adverse, and let them be, I pray, thus far, nor let it please the gods to try whether the Trojan offspring can endure an equal war. And you, anxious for your fate, lay aside, I beg, your tears, and worship the wounds that will bring you perpetual praises. For at no time, Rome, will you be greater. Soon you will so slip in prosperity that you preserve by fame the names of your disasters alone.

And now Fortune, alternating among the various changes of fortune on both sides, had mocked their angers with an uncertain outcome, and, with the hope of both nations long hanging in the midst, Mavors blazed amid the matched arms: as when gentle breezes stir the green stalks, and the wind does not yet drive the ears that are not yet ripe, hither and thither the top of the crop goes, and, nodding in turn with alternate motion, gleams, slowly bent. At last Nealces, charging with a sharp shout, scatters the line broken by the barbarian forces. The wedges were loosened, and through the gaps, hastened on, the foe burst upon the alarmed. Then in a black whirlwind a torrent of blood overflows, and no body falls beneath a single point. While the Ausonian warrior fears wounds in the back, he catches the savage deaths in his breast and wards off disgrace from his death.

There stood among the foremost in the contest of the middle battle, ever loving the harsh and equal to any peril, Scaevola, and now he did not wish for life amid so great a slaughter, but a death worthy of his forefather and a dying under a name. He, after he saw that things were broken and that destruction grew, said: 'Let us extend whatever brief space of life is left; for valour is an idle name, unless the times of a glorious death be enough in the bearing.' He spoke, and into the midst, where the roused right hand of the Carthaginian drives a path, straining, he is borne with a vast whirlwind. Here he comes upon Caralis, exulting and wishing to put on the snatched gear from a slain man's lofty trunk, with his sword, and drove the iron in, in anger, up to the hilt. That man rolls, falling, and at the hostile fields with his bite he snatches and presses the pangs of death into the earth. Nor did the raging hands of Gabar and Siccha hold back their man with united valour; but keen Gabar lost, while he stood, his right hand, cut off amid the battles; and Siccha, while, with great grief troubling him, he rashly hastens aid, unforeseeing trod on a sword and fell, and too late condemned the steps of his bare foot, and lies by the right hand of his dying friend. At last the swelling fury of the youth turned the fatal weapons of lightning-like Nealces. He leaps forth, burning, with so famous a name goading him toward the prizes of slaughter. Then a flint, torn from a crag, which the torrent had brought down from the high mountains, he snatches and, turbid, whirls into his face. The jaws cracked at the dashed weight, and the face was carried away from the man: the gore flows through the nostrils with the bloody brain congealed, and black the eyes drip from their crushed sockets and the maimed lights from the forehead. Marius is laid low, having tried to succour his like-souled Caper, and fearing to survive the man as he fell. The same beginning of life, the same fatherland, and common to the two their poverty: the youths, born at sacred Praeneste, had mingled their pursuits and sowed on shared land. The same was their to-wish and not-to-wish, and a mind allied through all their life, and a concord rich in little things. They fell together, and of all their prayers this one Fortune granted, a death joined in the midst of battle. The twin arms were a glory to the victor Symaethus.

But it was not allowed the Carthaginians to rejoice long in so great a gift of chance. With menacing terror was at hand Scipio, pitying the backs of the cohort turned in flight, and Varro, the source of all the evil, and yellow-haired Curio and Brutus, descended from the first consul. And the line, propped by these men, would have repaired the lost field with a new mass, had not the Carthaginian leader suddenly with a whirlwind curbed his columns now running forward. And he, when he saw Varro afar amid the battles and the lictor flying around him with his red cloak: 'I know the pomp, and I know the insignia. Such was Flaminius lately,' he said. Then, hot, the keen anger of his huge shield he foretells with a thunder. Alas, wretched man! You could have been made equal in death to Paulus, had it not then, by the gods' anger, been taken from you to have fallen by Hannibal's hand. How often will you complain, Varro, to the gods, that you fled the Sidonian sword! For Scipio, bearing in death a sudden safety with his rapid charge, †turned upon himself the dangers begun. Nor does it grieve the Carthaginian, though the honour of a rich slaughter is snatched away, to have changed his battle for a greater foe, and at the Ticinus's streams to exact the penalties for his snatched father, the contest at last offered. They stood, brought forth on different shores of the world, such as no other land had seen meet, equal in Mars and right hand, but in the rest the Latin leader went before, better in piety and faith.

They leaped down to the troubled battle from a hollow cloud, Mavors fearing for the son of Scipio, the Tritonian for the Carthaginian, and at the coming of the gods both battle-lines trembled, their leaders undaunted. Black, where Pallas turns her breast, the fire flashes far and wide from the Gorgon's face, and the aegis twists its hissings with horrid serpents. Bloody, so that you would believe a twin comet quivered, gleam her eyes, and on the top of her helmet a generous crest rolls its waving flames to the stars. But Mavors, driving the air before with his weapon brandished and wrapping the field in his shield, wears the breastplate that pours out Aetnean fires by the gift of the Cyclopes, and beats the air, rising with his tawny crest.

The leaders, intent on battle, and having measured more closely how much each in turn would dare, yet perceived that the arms-bearing gods had come, and, each glad to be watched by the gods, added wraths to their minds. And now Pallas with her right hand had twisted aside the spear, poised with a strong blow from the Carthaginian's breast, and Gradivus, taught by the example to bring aid to the fierce goddess, straightway held out the Aetnean sword to the youth for the battles and bade him greater things. Then the Virgin, kindling deep within, violent, suddenly flooded her face with flames, and twisting her sidelong eyes, surpassed the Gorgon with her troubled visage. All the monstrous water-snakes raised their huge limbs, the aegis being shaken, and at the blows of her first frenzy Mavors himself drew back his foot by degrees from the contest. Here the goddess, with a swift effort, hurls a torn part of the neighbouring mountain and rocks bristling with crags at Mars, raging, and Sason, its shore shaken, took fright at the sounds carried far back.

But these battles did not deceive the king of the gods. He quickly sends down Iris, girded with clouds, to curb the excessive movements, and speaks thus: 'Go, goddess, and swiftly glide to the Oenotrian lands, and tell my sister to soften her fierce angers and not to hope to overturn the fixed laws of the Parcae. Tell her too: ''If you do not desist (for I know the venom and heat of your flame-bearing mind) and do not gather in your anger, you shall learn how far the dread thunderbolts excel the aegis.''' After the Tritonian maiden, hesitating, received this, nor for long sure enough whether to yield to her father's arms: 'We will withdraw,' she said, 'from the field. But with Pallas driven off, will he turn aside the fates? And will he keep me from the high heaven from seeing the fields of Garganus seething with slaughter?' Having spoken thus, she bore the Carthaginian, lifted in a hollow cloud, away from the contests, and left the lands.

But fierce Gradivus, at the departure of the goddess returning to the air, recalls the minds, and those scattered over the plain he himself with his great hand, wrapped in keen mist, restores to the battle. The Italians turn their standards and renew, their fear reversed, a new slaughter. The keeper set over the winds, whose breaths the prison holds compressed by his command, and to whom heaven and the rushing East winds and the North obey, and the West winds and the South, at the prayers of Juno, who brought no small promises, unbridles for the battles, on the Aetolian plains, the reigning Vulturnus. This avenger of her destroying anger pleases her. He, after he plunged himself into the white pit of Aetna and conceived fires and brought forth a flaming face, flies out with a horrendous shriek, and the Daunian realms he blows through, driving a blind cloud of gathered dust. The gusts snatched away their eyes and their voice and their hands. With its sandy white whirl, lamentable to tell, it whirls balls of it into the faces of the Italians, and rejoices in the frenzy bidden to war with the companies. Then by the mass of ruin both soldier and arms and trumpets are laid low on the earth, and every lance is carried backward, the blast meeting it, and on the Rutulians the blow falls vainly on their backs. And the same blast favours the weapons of the Carthaginians, and, like spears hurled with a throwing-strap, the whirlwind helps and, shrieking, drives on the Tyrian spears. Then the soldier, his throat closed with dense dust, mourns his coward death with his gaping mouth choked. He himself, his yellow head hidden in the black gloom, Vulturnus, and his hair drenched with much sand, now drives those turned from behind with his shrieking wings, now, coming against their faces in the centre, with the screaming storm shakes their arms before them and hisses with his open mouth. At times those intent on battle and now, now on the point of bearing the steel to the enemy's throat with effort and blow, he turns aside and tears the right hand from the very wound. Nor is it enough to befoul the Ausonian cohorts far and wide: he vomits into the war the air mingled with bellowings, and twice with his whirlwind he made the topmost crests of the god quiver.

While the Aeolian fury wages these battles against the Roman squadrons and kindles Mars into wrath, the Virgin, with Juno as ally, addresses her father: 'How great a flood Gradivus drives into the Punic camp, look, and with how great slaughters, raging, he fills himself! Now, I beg, does it not please you that Iris descend to the lands? Although I came not to destroy the Trojans (since with our pledge Rome reigns, and I set my seat with the Palladium in this city), not to destroy the Trojans, but I refused that the light of her nursling Libya, Hannibal, be driven from life in his flowering years and that beginnings so great be extinguished.' Here Juno takes her up, and from the anger of her long toil: 'Nay,' she said, 'that the nations may know how much the measureless realms of Jove avail and how much your power, husband, stands before all the gods, scatter with your blazing weapon (we ask nothing else) the citadels of Carthage, and plunge the Sidonian line, in a vast chasm of the earth, into the Tartarean depths, or overwhelm it with the sea.' Against this Jupiter answers with gentle face: 'You contend with the fates and stretch out sickly hopes. He, O daughter, to whom you gladly bore hostile weapons, that youth shall crush the Tyrians and put on the name of the race and carry the Libyan laurel to the Capitol. But he to whom you, wife, give spirit and glory, (I sing the fates) shall turn his arms away from the Laurentine peoples. Nor are the bounds of disaster far off. The hour and the day comes on which he shall wish he had crossed no Alps at all.' So he says, and quickly sends Iris down from Olympus to recall Mars and bid him withdraw from the battle. Nor, having struggled against the prohibition, did Gradivus go off into the high clouds without a roar, though the war-horns and trumpets and wounds and blood and shouting and arms gave him joy.

When at last the field lay open, free of the gods' contest, and loosed of the god, the Carthaginian rushes from the lowest part of the plain, whither he had gradually fled from the heavenly arms, drawing with a great voice both horse and men and the mass of the wild turret-bearing beast and the labours of the engines. And when he recognized the youth, troubling the troops with his lighter sword, and his anger sparkled on his bloody cheeks: 'What Furies or what god,' he said, 'drove you against the foe, see, Minucius, that you should dare again to entrust yourself to us? Your father, born of my arms, where is your Fabius now? Once, shameless one, let it be enough to have escaped our hands.' And then, the spear, companion to his proud words, with a wall-breaking whirlwind pierces through his breast and forestalls his coming words with the blow.

Nor is it enough to rage with the iron. The wild beast is brought up with its black mass, and the Italian manhood is matched against the monsters. For, riding ahead on his horse, he bids the Moor who guides the Lucanian oxen into war with his goad to drive on with greater spurs and to whirl on the herds of the Libyan beasts. Hugely shrieking it is driven, and, compelled by frequent wound, the warlike beast bears its hasty steps. On its livid back sits a tower armed with flame and men and javelins. From afar the rough hail of stones falls upon the arms, and far and wide the Libyan, lofty, pours a flying cloud of weapons from the mound. A long rampart stands, crowded through the close columns, with snow-white tusks, and, fixed at close quarters to the ivory, a spear gleams, its point directed from the curved tip. Here, amid the alarms of the moment, through limbs, through arms, the beast drives its wicked tusk into Ufens and bears him, crying out, carried over the trampled columns. Nor was Tadius's death lighter: where his breastplate of many-folded linen closes his side, by degrees the wicked points of the tusk pierced, his body unhurt, and bore the man aloft, his shield resounding. His valour was not shaken off by the terror of the new peril: he uses the chance for glory, and, near, with his swift sword pierces through the twin light before its brow. Goaded by the heavy wound, the beast lifts itself to the air and, with its legs raised, casts off and hurls the tower far behind, rolling with its weight bent back. Arms and men together and the beast, robbed of its sight, are laid low in a sudden ruin, pitiable, mingled.

Against the fighting monsters the Dardanian leader bids blazing torches be scattered, and the walls which the beast carries about to be filled with the sulphur of the black brand. Nor was there delay at the command. The smoking backs of the elephants gleam with the gathered flames, and the devouring fire, snatched by the sounding wind, is borne through the bulwarks. No otherwise, when a shepherd casts fires on Pindus or Rhodope, and the burning plague ranges through the woods, the leafy crags catch fire, and suddenly through the high ridges the Vulcanian blaze gleams, leaping abroad. The beast goes, its body glowing with white-hot pitch, distraught, and parts the squadrons with a wide path. Nor has anyone valour to take up closer battle: they dare with far-off javelins and the blow of the reed. It burns, impatient, and with the heat of its great body the beast, casting flames hither and thither, kindles them, until at last it threw itself headlong into the waves of a neighbouring river, and, deceived by the thin liquid, through the levels of the standing shoal it bore, driven on, the flame towering from the long banks. Then at last it plunged its mass, the deep receiving it, into the gulf.

But where battle is given, and not yet is the Maurusian plague hot with fire, the Rhoetean manhood, poured around, now with javelins, now with stones, now with winged lead assail it from afar, like those who storm fortresses fortified through high places and besiege citadels. Daring deeds worthy of the man, worthy of favouring fortune, the unlucky Mincius had raised his right hand and his sword close against it in his daring; but the beast, shrieking, breathing out its panting heat, took away his hand with its keen coil, entangled in a knot, and twisted it with a dire bond, and, hurling the wretched man high through the upper air, dashed him to the earth, lamentable, with his limbs crushed.

Amid these disasters, Varro being seen beneath arms, Paulus, upbraiding him: 'Why do we not go close,' he said, 'against the Tyrian leader, whom we promised the city would stand bound, his neck in chains, before your chariot? Alas, fatherland, alas, commons wicked and crooked in favour! Never in so hard a lot of evils will you make out which it should rather have been your prayer never to have been born to you, Varro or Hannibal.' While Paulus says such things, the Libyan presses the headlong and against the backs of those rushing before his eyes rouses all the spears of the leader. The helmet is beaten and the consul's arms are shaken. The keener for this, Paulus, fierce, rushes into the midst of the foe.

But then Varro, his mind struck from him, turned, with Paulus drawn away into trackless contests, and bending his steed with his hand: 'You pay the penalties, fatherland,' he said, 'who, with Fabius unharmed, called Varro to the wars. But what discord of mind or of fate and what hidden trick of the Parcae is there? Long since it pleases me to break off all things together with the light. But some god or other holds back my sword. But for what graver things he keeps me! Shall I live? And shall I carry these broken fasces, scattered with the blood of my own, back to the people, and shall I give my face to be gazed on through the angry cities, and—what Hannibal himself would scarcely demand more savagely—shall I flee and see you, Rome?' As he protested more, the foes drove him on with closer weapons, and his steed, the reins loosed, snatched him away.