Page:Homer - Iliad, translation Pope, 1909.djvu/306

304 And last Tlepolemus and Pyres bleed.

Where'er he moves, the growing slaughters spread

In heaps on heaps, a monument of dead.

When now Sarpedon his brave friends beheld

Grovelling in dust, and gasping on the field,

With this reproach his flying host he warms:

"Oh stain to honour! oh disgrace to arms!

Forsake, inglorious, the contended plain;

This hand, unaided, shall the war sustain;

The task be mine, this hero's strength to try,

Who mows whole troops, and makes an army fly."

He spake; and, speaking, leaps from off the car;

Patroclus lights, and sternly waits the war.

As when two vultures on the mountain's height

Stoop with resounding pinions to the fight;

They cuff, they tear, they raise a screaming cry;

The desert echoes, and the rocks reply:

The warriors thus, opposed in arms, engage

With equal clamours, and with equal rage.

Jove viewed the combat, whose event foreseen,

He thus bespoke his sister and his queen:

"The hour draws on; the destinies ordain

My godlike son shall press the Phrygian plain:

Already on the verge of death he stands,

His life is owed to fierce Patroclus' hands.

What pa'ssions in a parent's breast debate!

Say, shall I snatch him from impending fate,

And send him safe to Lycia, distant far

From all the dangers and the toils of war?

Or to his doom my bravest offspring yield,

And fatten with celestial blood the field?"

Then thus the goddess with the radiant eyes:

"What words are these, O sovereign of the skies?

Short is the date prescribed to mortal man; Shall Jove, for one, extend the narrow span, Whose bounds were fixed before his race began? How many sons of gods, foredoomed to death, Before proud Ilion must resign their breath!

Were thine exempt, debate would rise above, And murmuring Powers condemn their partial Jove. Give the bold chief a glorious fate in fight; And when the ascending soul has winged her flight, Let Sleep and Death convey, by thy command, The breathless body to his native land. His friends and people, to his future praise, A marble tomb and pyramid shall raise, And lasting honours to his ashes give; His fame—'tis all the dead can have—shall live." She said: the Cloud-compeller, overcome,