Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/263

 the walls of our infant Troy, with a second army; once more Tydeus' son from his Ætolian Arpi is rising against the Teucrians. Ay, my wounds, I ween, are yet in the future, and I, thine own offspring, am delaying the destined course of a mortal spear. If it is without your leave and            5 despite your will that the Trojans have won their way to Italy, let them expiate the crime and withdraw from them thine aid: but if they have but followed those many oracles given by powers above and powers underground, how can any now be able to reverse thine ordinance and write             10 anew the page of fate? Why should I remind thee of our fleet consumed on Eryx' shore? why of the monarch of the storms and his raving winds stirred up from Æolia, or of Iris sent down from the clouds? Now she is even rousing the ghosts below—that portion of the world till then was            15 untried—and on a sudden Allecto is launched on upper air, and rages through the Italian cities. It is not for empire that I am disquieted; for that we hoped in the past, while our star yet shone: let them conquer whom thou wouldst have conquer. If there is no country on earth                20 which thy relentless spouse will allow the Teucrians, I adjure thee, father, by the smoking ruins of Troy overthrown, let me send away Ascanius safe from the war—let my grandson survive in life. Æneas, indeed, may be tossed on unknown waters, and follow such course as chance may              25 give him: him let me have the power to screen and withdraw from the horrors of battle. Amathus is mine, and lofty Paphos, and high Cythera, and the mansion of Idalia: there let him pass his days unwarlike and inglorious. Let it be thy will that Carthage shall bow Ausonia beneath               30 her tyrannous sway; the Tyrian cities need fear no resistance from him. What has it advantaged him to have escaped the plague of war and fled through the hottest of the Argive fires, to have drained to the dregs all those dangers by sea and on broad earth, while the Teucrians               35 are in quest of Latium and a restored Pergamus? Give back, great sire, to our wretched nation their Xanthus and their Simois, and let the Teucrians enact once more the old