Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/225

 serpent stood round thee with all her throng of heads. Hail to thee, authentic offspring of Jove, fresh ornament of the sky! come to us, come to these thine own rites with favouring smile and auspicious gait." Such things their songs commemorate; and they crown all with Cacus'     5 cave and the fiend himself, the fire panting from his lungs. The entire grove echoes with their voices, and the hills rebound.

The sacrifice over, the whole concourse returns to the city. There walked the king, mossed over with years,     10 keeping at his side Æneas and his son as he moved along, and lightening the way with various speech. Æneas admires, and turns his quick glance from sight to sight: each scene enthralls him; and with eager zest he inquires and learns one by one the records of men of old. Then     15 spoke king Evander, the builder of Rome's tower-crowned hill: "These woodlands were first inhabited by native Fauns and Nymphs, and by a race of men that sprung from trunks of trees and hard oaken core; no rule of life, no culture had they: they never learnt to yoke the ox,     20 nor to hive their stores, nor to husband what they got; the boughs and the chase supplied their savage sustenance. The first change came from Saturn, who arrived from skyey Olympus, flying from the arms of Jove, a realmless exile. He brought together the race, untamed as they      25 were and scattered over mountain heights, and gave them laws, and chose for the country the name of Latium, because he had found it a safe hiding-place. The golden age of story was when he was king, so calm and peaceful his rule over his people; till gradually there crept in a      30 race of worse grain and duller hue, and the frenzy of war, and the greed of having. Then came the host of Ausonia and the Sicanian tribes, and again and again Saturn's land changed its name; then came king after king, savage Thybris with his giant bulk, from whom in after days we    35 Italians called the river Tiber: the authentic name of ancient Albula was lost. Myself, an exile from my country, while voyaging to the ends of the sea, all-powerful