Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/72

 the bulwark of their old worship. For if your hand should profane Minerva's offering, then (said he) a mighty destruction—may the gods turn the omen on his head ere it falls on yours!—would come on the empire of Priam and the Phrygian nation; but if these hands of yours     5 should help it to scale your city's height, Asia would roll the mighty tide of invasion on the walls of Pelops,[o] and our posterity would have to meet the fate he threatened.'

"Such was the stratagem—the cursed art of perjured Sinon—that gained credence for the tale; and such the     10 victory won over us by wiles and constrained tears—over us, whom not Tydeus' son, nor Achilles of Larissa, nor ten years of war subdued, nor a fleet of a thousand sail.

"And now another object, greater and far more terrible,     15 is forced on my poor countrymen, to the confusion of their unprophetic souls. Laocoon, drawn by lot as Neptune's priest, was sacrificing a mighty bull at the wonted altar—when behold from Tenedos, over the still deep—I shudder as I recount the tale—two serpents coiled in vast      20 circles are seen breasting the sea, and moving side by side towards the shore. Their breasts rise erect among the waves; their manes, of blood-red hue, tower over the water, the rest of them floats behind on the main, trailing a huge undulating length; the brine foams and dashes      25 about them; they are already on shore, in the plain—with their glowing eyes bloodshot and fiery, and their forked tongues playing in their hissing mouths. We fly all ways in pale terror: they, in an unswerving column, make for Laocoon, and first each serpent folds round one      30 of his two sons, clasping the youthful body, and greedily devouring the poor limbs. Afterwards, as the father comes to the rescue, weapon in hand, they fasten on him and lash their enormous spires tight round him—and now twice folded round his middle, twice embracing his neck with     35 their scaly length, they tower over him with uplifted head and crest. He is straining with agonizing clutch to pull the knots asunder, his priestly fillets all bedewed with gore