Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/121

 almighty one heard him, and turned his eyes to the queenly city and the guilty pair, lost to their better fame. Then thus he bespeaks Mercury, and gives him a charge like this:—"Go, haste, my son, summon the Zephyrs, and float on thy wings; address the Dardan chief, who is now dallying       5 in Tyrian Carthage, and giving no thought to the city which Destiny makes his own; carry him my commands through the flying air. It was not a man like that whom his beauteous mother promised us in him, and on the strength of her word twice rescued him from the sword of        10 Greece. No, he was to be one who should govern Italy—Italy, with its brood of unborn empires, and the war-cry bursting from its heart—who should carry down a line sprung from the grand fountain-head of Teucer's blood, and should force the whole world to bow to the laws[o] he        15 makes. If he is fired by no spark of ambition for greatness like this, and will not rear a toilsome fabric for his own praise, is it a father's heart that grudges Ascanius the hills of Rome? What is he building? What does he look to in lingering on among a nation of enemies, with no thought       20 for the great Ausonian family, or for the fields of Lavinium? Away with him to sea! This is our sentence; thus far be our messenger."

Jove had spoken, and Mercury was preparing to execute the great sire's command: first he binds to his feet his       25 sandals, all of gold, which carry him, uplifted by their pinions, over sea no less than land, with the swiftness of the wind that wafts him. Then he takes his rod—the rod with which he is wont to call up pale spectres from the place of death, to send others on their melancholy way to       30 Tartarus, to give sleep or take it away, and to open the eyes when death is past. With this in hand, he drives the winds before him, and makes a path through the sea of clouds. And now in his flight he espies the crest and the tall sides of Atlas the rugged, who with his top supports       35 the sky—Atlas, whose pine-crowned dead, ever wreathed with dark clouds, is buffeted by wind and rain. A mantle of snow wraps his shoulders; rivers tumble from his hoary