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150 put all these tasks aside; War, and Wisdom, and even Government itself, must be content to come to a standstill, until the behests of Beauty have been obeyed.

The idea of the Shield of Æneas, which Venus comes and lays before him while he sleeps, is of course borrowed directly from Homer's Shield of Achilles. But the working out of it is quite original. Vulcan's subject, in this case, is not, as in the Shield of the Iliad, an epitome of human life, but a prophetic history of Rome. The whole passage in which it is elaborately described is of remarkable beauty even to our modern taste, and upon a Roman's ear and imagination must have had a wonderful effect. The story is told in eight (or perhaps nine) compartments, filled with the leading events in the great city's existence. The two first contain the birth of Romulus, and the union of the Romans with the Sabines, which began with the seizure of the Sabine women:—

There too the mother-wolf he made

In Mars's cave supinely laid:

Around her udders undismayed

The gamesome infants hung,

While she, her loose neck backward thrown,

Caressed them fondly, one by one,

And shaped them with her tongue.

Hard by, the towers of Rome he drew

And Sabine maids in public view

Snatched 'mid the Circus games:

So 'twixt the fierce Romulean brood

And Tatius with his Cures rude

A sudden war upflames.