Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/235

 standing in arms before the altar of Jove with goblets in their hands and cementing a treaty with swine's blood. Not far off Mettus had already been torn asunder by the chariots driven apart—ah! false Alban, were you but a keeper of your word!—and Tullus was dragging the               5 traitor's flesh through the woodland, while the bushes were sprinkled with the bloody rain. There, too, was Porsenna insisting that exiled Tarquin should be taken back and leaguering the city with a mighty siege: Æneas' sons were flinging themselves on the sword in freedom's cause. In         10 his face might be seen the likeness of wrath, and the likeness of menace, that Cocles[o] should have the courage to tear down the bridge, that Cloelia should break her prison and swim the river. There was Manlius standing sentinel on the summit of the Tarpeian fortress in the          15 temple's front, holding the height of the Capitol, while the Romulean thatch looked fresh and sharp on the palace-roof. And there was the silver goose fluttering its wings in the gilded cloister, and shrieking that the Gauls were at the door. The Gauls were at hand marching among              20 the brushwood, and had gained the summit sheltered by the darkness and the kindly grace of dusky night. Golden is their hair and golden their raiment; striped cloaks gleam on their shoulders; their milk-white necks are twined with gold; each brandishes two Alpine javelins,      25 his body guarded by the long oval of his shield. There he had shown in relief the Salii in their dances and the naked Luperci, and the woolly peaks of their caps, and the sacred shields which fell from heaven: chaste matrons were making solemn progress through the city in their           30 soft-cushioned cars. At distance from these he introduces too the mansions of Tartarus, Pluto's yawning portals, and the torments of crime, and thee, Catiline, poised on the beetling rock and quailing at grim Fury-faces: and the good in their privacy, with Cato as their lawgiver. 35 Stretching in its breadth among these swept the semblance of the swelling sea, all of gold, but the blue was made to foam with whitening billows; and all about it dolphins