the grand grove that heroic Romulus restored
as a refuge—the Asylum—then shows him, under
its chilly rock, the grotto called the Lupercal,
in the old Arcadian way, Pan of Mount Lycaeus.
And he shows him the grove of hallowed Argiletum too,
he swears by the spot, retells the Death of Argus,
once his guest.
From there he leads Aeneas on
to Tarpeia’s house and the Capitol, all gold now
but once in the old days, thorny, dense with thickets.
Even then the awesome dread of the place struck fear
in the hearts of rustics, even then they trembled
before the woodland and the rock.
“This grove,” he says,
“this hill with its crown of leaves is a god’s home,
whatever god he is. My Arcadians think they’ve seen
almighty Jove in person, often brandishing high
his black storm-shield in his strong right hand
as he drives the tempest on. Here, what’s more,
in these two towns, their walls razed to the roots,
you can see the relics, monuments of the men of old.
This fortress built by Father Janus, that by Saturn:
this was called the Janiculum, that, Saturnia.”
So,
conversing and drawing near Evander’s humble home,
they saw herds of cattle, everywhere, lowing loud
in the Roman Forum and Carinae’s elegant district.
“These gates,” Evander says, as he reaches his lodge,
“Hercules in his triumph stooped to enter here.
This mansion of mine was grand enough for him.
Courage, my friend! Dare to scoff at riches.
Make yourself—you too—worthy to be a god.
Come into my meager house, and don’t be harsh.”
So he said, and under his narrow sloped roof
he led the great Aeneas, laid him down on a bed
of fallen leaves and the hide of a Libyan bear.
Night comes rushing down, embracing the earth
in its deep dark wings.
But his mother, Venus,
stirred by fear—no wonder—by all the threats
and the Latins’ violent uproar, goes to Vulcan now
and there in their golden bridal chamber whispers,
breathing immortal love through every word:
“When Greek kings were ravishing Troy in war,
her fated towers, her ramparts doomed to enemy fires,
I asked no help for the victims then, I never begged
for the weapons right within your skill and power.
No, my dearest husband, I’d never put you to work
in a lost cause, much as I owed to Priam’s sons,
however often I wept for Aeneas’ grueling labors.
Now, by Jove’s command he lands on Rutulian soil,
so now I do come, kneeling before the godhead I adore,
begging weapons for my Aeneas, a mother for her son!
Remember Aurora, Tithonus’ wife, and Nereus’ daughter?
Both wept and you gave way. Look at the armies massing,
cities bolting their gates, honing swords against me
to cut my loved ones down.”
No more words.
The goddess threw her snow-white arms around him
as he held back, caressing him here and there,
and suddenly he caught fire—the same old story,
the flame he knew by heart went running through him,
melting him to the marrow of his bones. As thunder
at times will split the sky and a trail of fire goes
rippling through the clouds, flashing, blinding light—
and his wife sensed it all, delighting in her bewitching ways,
she knew her beauty’s power.
And father Vulcan,
enthralled by Venus, his everlasting love, replied:
“Why plumb the past for appeals? Where has it gone,
goddess, the trust you lodged in me? If only
you’d been so passionate for him, then as now,
we would have been in our rights to arm the Trojans,
even then. Neither Father Almighty nor the Fates
were dead against Troy’s standing any longer or
Priam’s living on for ten more years. But now,
if you are gearing up for war, your mind set,
whatever my pains and all my skills can promise,
whatever molten electrum and iron can bring to life,
whatever the bellows’ fiery blasts can do—enough!
Don’t pray to me now. Never doubt your powers.”
With those words on his lips, he gave his wife
the embraces both desired, then sinking limp
on her breast he courted peaceful sleep
that stole throughout his body.
And then,
when the first deep rest had driven sleep away
and the chariot of Night had wheeled past mid-career,
that hour a housewife rises, faced with scratching out
a living with loom and Minerva’s homespun crafts,
and rakes the ashes first to awake the sleeping fires,
adding night to her working hours, and sets her women
toiling on at the long day’s chores by torchlight—
and all to keep the bed of her husband chaste
and rear her little boys—so early, briskly,
in such good time the fire-god rises up
from his downy bed to labor at his forge.
Not far
from Aeolian Lipare flanked by Sicily’s coast,
an island of smoking boulders surges from the sea.
Deep below it a vast cavern thunders, hollowed out
like vaults under Etna, forming the Cyclops’ forges.
You can hear the groaning anvils boom with mighty strokes,
the hot steel ingots screeching steam in the cavern’s troughs
and fires panting hard in the furnace—Vulcan’s home,
it bears the name Vulcania.
Here the firegod dove from heaven’s heights.
The Cyclops were forging iron now in the huge cave:
Thunder and Lightning and Fire-Anvil stripped bare.
They had in hand a bolt they had just hammered out,
one of the countless bolts the Father rains on earth
from the arching sky—part buffed already, part still rough.
Three shafts of jagged hail they’d riveted on that weapon,
three of bursting stormclouds, three of blood-red flame
and the Southwind winging fast. They welded into the work
the bloodcurdling flashes, crackling Thunder, Terror
and Rage in hot pursuit. Others were pressing on,
forging a chariot’s whirling wheels for Mars
to harrow men and panic towns in war.
Others were finishing off the dreaded aegis
donned by Pallas Athena blazing up in arms—
outdoing themselves with burnished gilded scales,
with serpents coiling, writhing around each other,
the Gorgon herself, the severed head, the rolling eyes,
the breastplate forged to guard the goddess’ chest.
“Pack it away!” he shouts. “Whatever you’ve started,
set it aside, my Cyclops of Etna, bend to this!
Armor must be forged for a man of courage!
Now for strength, you need it! Now for flying hands!
Now for mastery, all your skill! Cast delay to the winds!”
Enough said. At a stroke they all pitched into the work,
dividing the labors, share and share alike, and bronze
is running in rivers and flesh-tearing steel and
gold ore melting down in the giant furnace.
They are for
ging one tremendous shield, one
against all the Latin spears—welding seven plates,
circular rim to rim. And some are working the bellows
sucking the air in, blasting it out, while others
are plunging hissing bronze in the brimming troughs,
the ground of the cavern groaning under the anvils’ weight,
and the Cyclops raising their arms with all their power,
arms up, arms down to the drumming, pounding beat
as they twist the molten mass in gripping tongs.
While Vulcan, the Lord of Lemnos, spurs the work
below that Aeolian coast, the life-giving light
and birdsong under the eaves at crack of dawn
awake Evander from sleep in his humble lodge.
The old man rises, pulls a tunic over his chest
and binds his Etruscan sandals round his feet.
Over his right shoulder, down his flank he straps
an Arcadian sword, swirling back the skin of a panther
to drape his left side. For company, two watchdogs
go loping on before him over the high doorsill,
friends to their master’s steps. He makes his way
to the private quarters of his guest, Aeneas,
the old veteran bearing in mind their recent talk
and the help that he had promised. Just as early,
Aeneas is stirring too. One comes with his son, Pallas,
the other brings Achates. They meet and grasp right hands
and sitting there in the open court, are free at last
to indulge in frank discussion.
The old king starts in:
“Greatest chief of the Trojans—for while you are alive
I’ll never consider Troy and its kingdom conquered—
our power to reinforce you in war is slight,
though I know our name is great. Here the Tiber
cuts us off and there the Rutulians close the vise,
the clang of their armor echoes round our walls.
But I mean to ally you now with mighty armies,
vast encampments filled with royal forces—
your way to safety revealed by unexpected luck.
It’s Fate that called you on to reach our shores.”
“Now, not far from here Agylla city stands,
founded on age-old rock by Lydian people once,
brilliant in war, who built on Etruscan hilltops.
The city flowered for many years till King Mezentius
came to power—his brutal rule, barbaric force of arms.
Why recount his unspeakable murders, savage crimes? The tyrant!
God store up such pains for his own head and all his sons!
Why, he’d even bind together dead bodies and living men,
couple them tightly, hand to hand and mouth to mouth—
what torture—so in that poison, oozing putrid slime
they’d die by inches, locked in their brute embrace.
Then, at last, at the end of their rope, his people
revolt against that raving madman, they besiege
Mezentius and his palace, hack his henchmen down
and fling fire on his roof. In all this slaughter
he slips away, taking flight to Rutulian soil,
shielded by Turnus’ armies, his old friend.
So all Etruria rises up in righteous fury,
demanding the king, threatening swift attack.
Thousands, Aeneas, and I will put you in command.
Their fleet is massed on the shore and a low roar grows,
men crying for battle-standards now, but an aged prophet
holds them back, singing out his song of destiny:
‘You elite Lydian troops, fine flower of courage
born of an ancient race, oh, what just resentment
whips you into battle! Mezentius makes you burn
with well-earned rage. But still the gods forbid
an Italian commander to lead a race so great—
choose leaders from overseas!’
“At that, the Etruscan fighting ranks subsided,
checked on the field of battle, struck with awe
by the warnings of the gods. Tarchon himself
has sent me envoys, bearing the crown and scepter,
offering me the ensigns, urging: ‘Join our camp,
take the Etruscan throne.’ Ah, but old age,
sluggish, cold, played out with the years,
has me in its grip, denies me the command.
My strength is too far gone for feats of arms.
I’d urge my son to accept, but his blood is mixed,
half Sabine, thanks to his mother, and so, Italian.
You are the one whose age and breed the Fates approve,
the one the Powers call. March out on your mission,
bravest chief of the Trojans, now the Italians too.
What’s more, I will pair you with Pallas, my hope,
my comfort. Under your lead, let him grow hard
to a soldier’s life and the rough work of war.
Let him get used to watching you in action,
admire you as his model from his youth.
To him I will give two hundred horsemen now,
fighting hearts of oak—our best—and Pallas
will give you two hundred more, in Pallas’ name.”
He had barely closed and Anchises’ son, Aeneas,
and trusty Achates, their eyes fixed on the ground,
would long have worried deep in their anxious hearts
if Venus had not given a sign from the cloudless sky.
A bolt of lightning suddenly splits the heavens,
drumming thunder—the world seems to fall in a flash,
the blare of Etruscan trumpets blasting through the sky.
They look up—the terrific peals come crashing over and over—
and see blood-red in a brilliant sky, rifting a cloudbank,
armor clashing out. All the troops were dumbstruck,
all but the Trojan hero—well he knew that sound,
his goddess mother’s promise—and he calls out:
“Don’t ask, my friend, don’t ask me, I beg you,
what these portents bring. The heavens call for me.
My goddess mother promised to send this sign
if war were breaking out, and bring me armor
down through the air, forged by Vulcan himself
to speed me on in battle. But, oh dear gods,
what slaughter threatens the poor Laurentine people!
What a price in bloodshed, Turnus, you will pay me soon!
How many shields and helmets and corpses of the brave
you’ll churn beneath your tides, old Father Tiber!
All right then, you Rutulians,
beg for war! Break your pacts of peace!”
Fighting words. Aeneas rises from his high seat
and first he rakes the fires asleep on Hercules’ altar,
then gladly goes to the lowly gods of hearth and home
he worshipped just the day before. Evander himself
and his new Trojan allies, share and share alike,
slaughter yearling sheep as the old rite demands.
And next Aeneas returns to his ships and shipmates,
picks the best and bravest to take his lead in war
while the rest glide on at ease, no oars required
as the river’s current bears them on downstream
to bring Ascanius news of his father and his affairs.
Horses go to the Trojans bound for Tuscan fields,
and marked for Aeneas, a special mount decked out
in a tawny lion’s skin that gleams with gilded claws.
A sudden rumor flies through the little town:
“Horsemen are rushing toward the Tuscan monarch’s gates!”
Mothers struck with terror pray and re-echo prayers,
t
he fear builds as the deadly peril comes closer,
the specter of War looms larger, ever larger . . .
Evander, seizing the hand of his departing son,
clinging, weeping inconsolably, cries out:
“If only Jove would give me back the years,
all gone, and make me the man I was, killing
the front ranks just below Praeneste’s ramparts,
heaping up their shields, torching them in my triumph—
my right hand sent great King Erulus down to hell!
Three lives his mother Feronia gave him at his birth—
I shudder to say it now—three suits of armor for action.
Three times I had to lay him low but my right hand,
my right hand then, stripped him of all his lives
and all his armor too!
“Oh, if only! Then no force
could ever tear me now from your dear embrace,
my boy, nor could Mezentius ever have trod
his neighbor Evander down, butchered so many,
bereaved our city . . . so many widows left.
But you, you Powers above, and you, Jupiter,
highest lord of the gods: pity, I implore you,
a king of Arcadia, hear a father’s prayers!
If your commands will keep my Pallas safe
and if the Fates intend to preserve my son,
and if I live to see him, join him again,
why then I pray for life—
I can suffer any pain on earth. But if
you are threatening some disaster, Fortune,
let me break this brutal life off now, now
while anxieties waver and hopes for the future fade,
while you, my beloved boy, my lone delight come lately,
I still hold you in my embrace. Oh, let no graver news
arrive and pierce my ears!”
So at their last parting
the words came pouring deep from Evander’s heart.
He collapsed, and his servants bore him quickly
into the house.
And even now the cavalry
had come riding forth through the open gates,
Aeneas out in the lead, flanked by trusty Achates,
then other Trojan captains, with Pallas in command
of the column’s center, Pallas brilliant in battle cape
and glittering inlaid armor. Bright as the morning star
whom Venus loves above all the burning stars on high,
when up from his ocean bath he lifts his holy face
to the lofty skies and dissolves away the darkness.
Mothers stand on the ramparts, trembling, eyes trailing
the cloud of dust and the troops in gleaming bronze.
The Aeneid Page 30