Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/298

 witness Minerva's baleful star, and the crags of Eubœa, and Caphereus the avenger. Discharged from that warfare, wandering outcasts on diverse shores, Menelaus, Atreus' son, is journeying in banishment even to the pillars of Proteus[o]; Ulysses has looked upon Ætna and her Cyclop     5 brood. Need I tell of Neoptolemus' portioned realms, of Idomeneus' dismantled home, of Locrian settlers on a Libyan coast? Even the monarch[o] of Mycenæ, the leader of the great Grecian name, met death on his very threshold at the hand of his atrocious spouse; Asia fell     10 before him, but the adulterer rose in her room. Cruel gods, that would not have me restored to the hearth-fires of my home, to see once more the wife of my longing and my own fair Calydon! Nay, even my flight is dogged by portents of dreadful view; my comrades torn from me are winging     15 the air and haunting the stream as birds—alas that the followers of my fortunes should suffer so!—and making the rocks ring with the shrieks of their sorrow. Such was the fate I had to look for even from that day when with my frantic steel I assailed the flesh of immortals, and impiously     20 wounded Venus' sacred hand. Nay, nay, urge me no longer to a war like this. Since Pergamus fell, my fightings with Troy are ended; I have no thought, no joy, for the evils of the past. As for the gifts which you bring me from your home, carry them rather to Æneas. I tell     25 you, I have stood against the fury of his weapon, and joined hand to hand with him in battle; trust one who knows how strong is his onset as he rises on the shield, how fierce the whirlwind of his hurtling lance. Had Ida's soil borne but two other so valiant, Dardanus would have     30 marched in his turn to the gates of Inachus, and the tears of Greece would be flowing for a destiny reversed. All those years of lingering at the walls of stubborn Troy, it was Hector's and Æneas' hand that clogged the wheels of Grecian victory, and delayed her coming till the tenth     35 campaign had begun. High in courage were both, high in the glory of martial prowess; but piety gave him the preëminence. Join hand to hand in treaty, if so you may;