Page:Homer - Iliad, translation Pope, 1909.djvu/92

90 The shining whiteness, and the Tyrian dye:

So, great Atrides! shewed thy sacred blood,

As down thy snowy thigh distilled the streaming flood.

With horror seized, the king of men descried

The shaft infixed, and saw the gushing tide:

Nor less the Spartan feared, before he found

The shining barb appear above the wound.

Then, with a sigh that heaved his manly breast,

The royal brother thus his grief expressed,

And grasped his hand; while all the Greeks around

With answering sighs returned the plaintive sound:

"Oh, dear as life! did I for this agree

The solemn truce, a fatal truce to thee!

Wert thou exposed to all the hostile train,

To fight for Greece, and conquer to be slain?

The race of Trojans in thy ruin join,

And faith is scorned by all the perjured line.

Not thus our vows, confirmed with wine and gore,

Those hands we plighted, and those oaths we swore,

Shall all be vain: when heaven's revenge is slow,

Jove but prepares to strike the fiercer blow.

The day shall come, the great avenging day,

When Troy's proud glories in the dust shall lay,

When Priam's powers and Priam's self shall fall,

And one prodigious ruin swallow all.

I see the god, already, from the pole,

Bare his red arm, and bid the thunder roll;

I see the Eternal all his fury shed,

And shake his ægis o'er their guilty head.

Such mighty woes on perjured princes wait;

But thou, alas! deserv'st a happier fate.

Still must I mourn the period of thy days,

And only mourn, without my share of praise?

Deprived of thee, the heartless Greeks no more

Shall dream of conquests on the hostile shore;

Troy seized of Helen, and our glory lost,

Thy bones shall moulder on a foreign coast:

While some proud Trojan thus insulting cries,

And spurns the dust where Menelaüs lies,

'Such are the trophies Greece from Ilion brings,

And such the conquest of her king of kings!

Lo his proud vessels scattered o'er the main,

And, unrevenged, his mighty brother slain.'

Oh, ere that dire disgrace shall blast my fame,

O'erwhelm me, earth! and hide a monarch's shame."

He said: a leader's and a brother's fears

Possess his soul, which thus the Spartan cheers:

"Let not thy words the warmth of Greece abate;

The feeble dart is guiltless of my fate: