Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/52

 and the town Agenor's[o]; but on the frontiers are the Libyans, a race ill to handle in war. The queen is Dido, who left her home in Tyre to escape from her brother. Lengthy is her tale of wrong, lengthy the windings of its course; but I will pass rapidly from point to point, Her     5 husband was Sychæus, wealthiest of Phœnician landowners, and loved by his poor wife with fervid passion; on him her father had bestowed her in her maiden bloom, linking them together by the omens of a first bridal. But the crown of Tyre was on the head of her brother, Pygmalion,     10 in crime monstrous beyond the rest of men. They were two, and fury came between them. Impious that he was, at the very altar of the palace, the love of gold blinding his eyes, he surprises Sychæus with his stealthy steel, and lays him low, without a thought for     15 his sister's passion; he kept the deed long concealed, and with many a base coinage sustained the mockery of false hope[o] in her pining love-lorn heart. But lo! in her sleep there came to her no less than the semblance of her unburied spouse, lifting up a face of strange unearthly     20 pallor; the ruthless altar and his breast gored with the steel, he laid bare the one and the other, and unveiled from first to last the dark domestic crime. Then he urges her to speed her flight, and quit her home for ever, and in aid of her journey unseals a hoard of treasure long hid in     25 the earth, a mass of silver and gold which none else knew. Dido's soul was stirred; she began to make ready her flight, and friends to share it. There they meet, all whose hate of the tyrant was fell or whose fear was bitter; ships, that chanced to lie ready in the harbour, they seize, and     30 freight with gold. Away it floats over the deep, the greedy Pygmalion's wealth; and who heads the enterprise? a woman[o]! So they came to the spot where you now see yonder those lofty walls, and the rising citadel of Carthage the new; there they bought ground, which     35 got from the transaction the name of Byrsa,[o] as much as they could compass round with a bull's hide. But who are you after all? What coast are you come from, or