Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/95

 meet—a bull to Neptune, a bull to thee, beauteous Apollo—a black lamb to the storm-wind, to the favouring Zephyrs a white one.

"Fame flies abroad that King Idomeneus[o] has been driven to quit his paternal realm, that the shores of Crete     5 are abandoned, houses cleared of the enemy, dwellings standing empty to receive us. So we leave Ortygia's harbour, and fly along the deep, past Naxos' bacchant mountains, and green Donysa, Olearos, and snowy Paros, and the Cyclades sprinkled over the waves, and seas thick      10 sown with islands. Up rises the seaman's shout amid strain and struggle—each encourages his comrades, 'For Crete and our forefathers, ho!' A wind gets up from the stern and escorts us on our way, and at length we are wafted to the Curetes' time-honoured shore.      15

"And now the site is chosen, and I am rearing a city's walls and calling it Pergamia: the new nation is proud to bear the name of the old: I bid them love hearth and home, and raise and roof the citadel. Already the ships had been hauled up high and dry on the shore, the crews     20 were busied with marriage and tilling the new country, and I was appointing laws to live by, and houses to dwell in—when suddenly there came on the human frame a wasting sickness, shed from the whole tainted expanse of the sky, a piteous blight on trees and crops, a year charged with      25 death. There were men leaving the lives they loved, or dragging with them the bodies that burdened them, while Sirius baked the fields into barrenness, the herbage was parching, the corn was sickening, and would not yield its food. Back again to Phœbus and his Ortygian      30 oracle over the sea my father bids us go, and there sue for grace, asking the god to what haven he means to bring our overtoiled fortunes, whence he orders us to seek for help in our sufferings—whither to direct our course.

"It was night and all living things on earth were in the     35 power of sleep, when methought the sacred images of the gods, the Phrygian household deities, whom I had borne away with me from Troy, even from the midst of the blaz