Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/201

 your father Faunus' command sits heavy on your soul, I hold that every nation is foreign whose independence severs it from our rule, and that such is Heaven's intent. Turnus, too, if you go back to the first foundation of his house, has Inachus and Acrisius for his ancestors, and the   5 heart of Mycenæ for his home." But when, having tried in vain what these words can do, she sees Latinus obstinately bent, and meantime the serpent's fiendish mischief has sunk deep into her vitals, and is thrilling every vein, then at last the miserable queen, unsexed by the    10 portentous enormity, raves in ungoverned frenzy through the city's length and breadth; as oft you may see a top spinning under the lash, which boys are flogging round and round in a great ring in an empty courtyard, with every thought on their game: driven by the whip it     15 keeps making circle after circle: the beardless faces hang over it in puzzled wonder, marvelling how the boxwood can fly, as though the blows made it a living thing. With motion as furious she courses through crowded streets and unruly peoples. Nay, more than this, she     20 feigns the inspiration of Bacchus, nerving herself to more atrocious deeds, and climbing new heights of madness—flies into the woods, and hides her daughter among the leafy hills, all to snatch from the Teucrians the bridal bed and delay the kindling of Hymen's torch. "Evoe    25 Bacchus!" is her cry; "thou, and none but thou art fit mate for a maid like this. See! for thee she takes up the sacred wand, for thee she leads the dance, for thee she grows her dedicated hair." Fame flies abroad; other mothers are instinct with frenzy, and all have the same    30 mad passion driving them to seek a new home. They have left their houses, and are spreading hair and shoulders to the wind; while some are filling the sky with quivering shrieks, clad in fawn-skins, and carrying vine-branch spears. There in the middle is the queen all aglow, lifting    35 high a blazing pine, and singing the bridal song of Turnus and her daughter, her eye red and glaring; and sudden she shouts like a savage: "Ho! mothers of Latium all, where'er