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 that he is once more forced into battle, the Italians twice his foes, the second treaty broken like the first. Strife arises among the wildered citizens: some are for throwing open the town and unbarring the gates to the Dardans: nay, they even drag the monarch to the ramparts: others              5 draw the sword and prepare to guard the walls: as when a countryman has tracked out bees concealed in a cavernous rock and filled their hiding-place with pungent smoke, they in alarm for the common wealth flit about their waxen realm and stir themselves to wrath by vehement                 10 buzzing: the murky smell winds from chamber to chamber: a dull blind noise fills the cavern: vapours ascend into the void of air.

Yet another stroke fell on Latium's wearied sons, shaking with its agony the city to her foundations. When             15 the queen from her palace saw the enemy draw near, the walls assailed, flames flying roofward, the Rutulian army, the soldiers of Turnus nowhere in sight, she deemed, poor wretch, her warrior slain in the combat, and maddened with the access of grief, cries aloud that she alone is the          20 guilty cause, the fountainhead of all this evil; and flinging out wild words in the fury of her frenzied anguish, rends with desperate hand her purple raiment, and fastens from a lofty beam the noose of hideous death. Soon as Latium's wretched dames knew the blow that had fallen,               25 her daughter Lavinia is first to rend yellow hair and roseate cheek, and the rest about her ran as wildly: the palace re-echoes their wail. The miserable story spreads through the town: every heart sinks: there goes the old king with garments rent, all confounded by his consort's             30 death and his city's ruin: he soils his hoary locks with showers of unseemly dust, and oft and oft upbraids himself that he embraced not sooner Æneas the Dardan nor took him for son-in-law of his own free will.

Turnus, meantime, is plying the war far away on the                  35 plain, following here and there a straggler with abated zeal, himself and his steeds alike less buoyant. The air wafted to him the confused din, inspiring unknown terror,