as the Trojan breathes his last. Then Liris, Pagasus over him:
Liris struggling to clutch his reins, thrown from his horse
as it goes sprawling under him—Pagasus rushes to help
his falling comrade, reaches out with an unarmed hand
and both of them side by side pitch headlong down.
And adding kills, she takes Amastrus, Hippotas’ son,
then attacking at long range, with spearcasts pierces
Tereus and Harpalycus, then Demophoön, Chromis too
and for every shaft the girl let fly from her hand
another Phrygian fighter bit the dust.
Here’s Ornytus
riding his Calabrian charger in from a distance,
all decked out in exotic armor, the huntsman
setting up for a soldier. A bull’s-hide covers
his broad shoulders, the big yawning maw of a wolf
with glistening fangs in its jaws protects his head
and a hunter’s hook-tipped javelin arms his hand
as into the press he goes, topping all by a head
but Camilla runs him down—easy work with the ranks
in full retreat—and spears him through, exulting
over his body with all the hatred in her heart:
“Still in the woods, you thought, and flushing game,
my fine Etruscan hunter? Well, the day has come
when a woman’s weapons prove your daydreams wrong!
Still, you carry no mean fame to your fathers’ shades—
just tell them this: You died by Camilla’s spear!”
Lunging
she kills a pair of massive Trojans, Butes and Orsilochus.
Butes, his back turned, she stabs between the helmet and
breastplate, just where the horseman’s neck shines bare
and the shield on his left arm dangles down, off guard.
And fleeing Orsilochus now
as the Trojan drives her round in a huge ring,
Camilla tricks him, wheeling inside him, quick,
the pursuer now the pursued as she rears above him—
praying, begging for mercy—her battle-axe smashes down,
blow after blow through armor, bone, splitting his skull,
warm brains from the wound go splashing down his face.
Suddenly
right before Camilla, stunned with terror to see her here,
stands Aunus’ fighting son, an Apennine man and not
the least of Liguria’s liars while the Fates allow.
Once he sees there is no running away from battle,
no turning aside Camilla’s attack, he tries
to devise a ruse with all his craft and cunning,
letting loose: “Now where’s the glory, tell me,
a woman putting her trust in a powerful horse?
No more running away. Meet me on level ground,
in combat, hand-to-hand, gear up to fight on foot.
You’ll soon see whose windy boasts of glory
cheat him blind!”
Raked by the scathing taunt
Camilla blazes up in rage, hands off her horse
to an aide and takes her stand against the Ligurian:
fearless on foot and armed like him with a naked sword
and still unbattered shield. But quick as a flash
the soldier, certain his guile had won the day,
runs away himself, yanking his reins around and
digging iron spurs in his racing stallion’s flanks.
“Ligurian fool! So bloated with all your empty pride,
pulling your slippery inbred tricks for nothing!
Fraud will never carry you home, safe and sound,
to your lying father Aunus!”
So young Camilla cries
and lightning-fast on her feet outruns the charger,
snatches the reins and facing her enemy dead-on,
makes him pay with his own detested blood—
quick as Apollo’s falcon wheeling down from a crag
outraces a dove in flight to a high cloud, seizes it,
clutches it, hooked talons ripping its insides out,
its blood and plucked feathers drifting down the sky.
But the Father of Men and Gods, far from blind,
throned on his steep Olympian peak observes it all
and stirs Etruscan Tarchon into the savage fighting,
lashing the trooper on with the rough spur of rage.
So into the bloody, buckling lines rides Tarchon,
goading his horsemen on with a burst of mixed cries,
rallying each by name, spurring the routed back to battle:
“What’s your fear, you Tuscans forever deaf to shame?
Always slacking off! What cowardice saps your courage?
What, is a woman routing squadrons strong as ours?
Why have swords or useless lances gripped in our fists?
But you’re not slow when it comes to nightly bouts of love,
when the curved flute strikes up some frantic Bacchic dance!
Linger on for the feasts and cups at the groaning board—
that’s your love, your lust—
till the seer will bless and proclaim the sacrifice
and the rich victim lures you into the deep groves!”
With that, he whips his warhorse into the press,
braced to die himself, he rushes Venulus headlong,
sweeps him off his mount and hugging his enemy
tight to his chest with his clenched right arm,
gallops away with him, racing off full tilt.
A cry
hits the skies, all the Latins turning to watch
as Tarchon flies like wildfire down the field,
bearing the man and weapons both, then wrenches off
the iron point of Venulus’ spear and delves around
for a spot laid bare where a lethal blow might land,
the other fighting off the enemy’s hand from his throat,
pitting force against fury. Swift as a golden eagle seizes
a snake and towers into the sky, talons knotted round it,
claws clutching fast but the wounded serpent writhes
in its rippling coils, stiffens, scales bristling,
hissing through its fangs as it rears its head,
but all the more the eagle keeps on digging into
its struggling victim, its hooked beak ripping away,
its wings thrashing the air—so Tarchon sweeps his kill
right from the Tiber’s columns, Tarchon flushed with triumph.
Following hard on their captain’s feat and clear success
the Etruscans swing to attack . . . as Arruns starts
to circle swift Camilla, a match for her spear yet
more adept at cunning. His life is doomed by the Fates
but now he tests his luck for the quickest way in.
Wherever Camilla rages, plunging into the front,
there Arruns stalks her, quietly tracks her steps;
whenever she downs a foe and turns around for home,
round he tugs at his fast reins and ducks from sight.
Now this approach, now that, exploring the circuit
round from every side, he shakes his fatal spear
in his ruthless fist.
By chance, one Chloreus,
sacred to goddess Cybebe, once her priest—Camilla
spied him at long range, gleaming in Phrygian gear,
spurring a lathered warhorse decked with coat of mail,
its brazen scales meshing with gold like feathers stitched.
He himself, aflame in outlandish reds and purples,
shot Gortynian shafts from a Lycian bow, a bow
of gold slung from the priest’s shoulders, gold
his helmet too, and he’d knotted his saffron cape
and flaring linen pleats with a tawny golden brooch,
his shirt and barbarous leggings stiff with needled braid.
Camilla, keen to fix some Trojan arms on a temple wall
or sport some golden plunder out on the hunt,
she tracked him now, one man in the moil of war,
she stalked him wildly, reckless through the ranks,
afire with a woman’s lust for loot and plunder when,
grasping his chance at last, rising up from ambush
Arruns flings his spear with a winged prayer aloft:
“Apollo, highest of gods, lord of holy Soracte!
We worship you first and foremost, honor your fires
stoked by cords of pine! And we your celebrants firm
in our faith, we plant our feet in your embers glowing hot!
Grant, Father, our shame be blotted out by our spears,
almighty God Apollo! I am not bent on plunder
stripped from a girl, no trophy over her corpse.
My other feats of arms will win me glory. If only
this murderous scourge drops dead beneath my strokes,
back I’ll go to my fathers’ towns—unsung!”
Apollo heard
and willed that part of the prayer would win the day
but part he scattered abroad on the ruffling winds.
That Arruns should cut Camilla down in sudden death:
that he granted, true, but not that his noble land
should see him home again
and the gusting Southwinds swept that prayer away.
So when he sent his javelin hissing through the air
and all the Volscians, wheeling, trained their eyes
and alert minds on the princess, she was numb to it all,
the draft, the hiss, the weapon sent from the blue—until
the spear went ripping through her, under her naked breast
and it struck deep, it hammered home and drank her virgin blood.
Her frightened comrades hurry to brace their falling queen
but Arruns races off, more frantic than all the rest—
his triumph mixed with terror—no longer trusting his spear
or daring to meet the young girl’s weapons point-blank.
Like the wolf that’s killed some shepherd or hulking ox
and before attacking spears can catch him, races off
at once, darting into the pathless hills for cover—
he knows he’s done some outrage—frantic now,
he tucks his trembling tail between his legs
and heads for the woods. So Arruns, shaken,
slinking from sight, content with a bare escape,
loses himself in the milling lines of fighters.
Camilla,
dying, tugs at the spear but the iron point stands
fixed in the deep wound, wedged between her ribs.
She’s faint from loss of blood, her eyes failing,
chill with death, and the glowing color she had,
once, fades away. Then as she breathes her last,
she calls to Acca, alone of her young comrades,
more than all the others true to Camilla,
the only one with whom she shares her cares,
and here is what she says: “This far, Acca,
my sister, and I can go no further. Now
the raw wound saps my strength . . .
darkness, everywhere, closing in around me.
Go, quickly, carry my last commands to Turnus:
Take over the fighting, free the town from Trojans!
Now farewell.”
With Camilla’s last words she lost
her grip on the reins and, all against her will,
slipped down to the ground. Little by little
she grew cold, and wholly freed of her body,
laid down her head as her neck drooped limp
in the clutch of death, and she let her weapons fall.
Camilla’s life breath fled with a groan of outrage
down to the shades below.
And then, at that,
an immense cry rose up and hit the golden stars.
With Camilla down, the melee peaks to a new pitch,
the masses surging forward, the whole Trojan army,
Etruscan captains, Evander’s Arcadian wings.
But all the while Diana’s sentry, Opis,
posted high on a ridge, has scanned the fighting
unperturbed. And when at a distance she could see—
clear in the thick of battle, war cries, warriors’ fury—
Camilla beaten down by the brutal stroke of death,
she moaned, crying out from the bottom of her heart:
“Too cruel, dear girl, too cruel the price you pay
for trying, begging to challenge the men of Troy in combat!
What gain for you, your lonely life in the forest,
serving Diana, our quiver round your shoulder?
But your queen has not deserted you, shorn of honor,
not in your hour of death, nor will your death lack glory
among the race of man, nor will you bear the shame
of dying unavenged. Whoever defiled your body with
that wound will pay with the death that he deserves!”
Under
the mountain ridges stood an immense mound of earth,
hedged with shady ilex, the tomb of Dercennus,
an old Laurentine king. Here with a swoop
the lovely goddess first took up her post,
from the high ground looking round for Arruns . . .
and seeing him gleam in armor, puffed with pride,
“Why running away?” she shouted. “Step right up,
just come this way—to die! Collect the reward
you’ve earned for Camilla’s death. Just think,
you are to die by the arrows of Diana!”
That said,
the Thracian goddess, plucking a wind-swift shaft
from her golden quiver, drew her bow with a vengeance,
back to a full draw till the curved horns all but touched,
her balanced hands tense—left hand at the iron point,
right hand at the bowstring stretched to her breast—
then, the instant that Arruns heard the whizzing shaft
and whirring air the iron struck home in his flesh.
As he gasps out his last, his oblivious comrades
leave him sprawled in the nameless dust and
Opis flies away to Mount Olympus.
Their captain gone,
Camilla’s light horse squadrons are first to flee,
the harried Rutulians flee and brave Atinas too,
leaders routed, and front-line men, their leaders lost,
make for safety, swerving their horses, racing for the walls.
But nothing can halt the Trojans’ fierce offensive now,
no weapons can stop them, nothing stand against them.
Home the Latins go, slack bows on sagging shoulders,
galloping hoofbeats pound the rutted plain with thunder.
As a dust storm dark as night goes whirling toward the walls,
the mothers stand at the lookouts, beating their breasts,
raising the women’s shrilling wails to the starry sky.
And the first Latins to rush through the open gates?
Enemies mixing in with their own ranks crowd them hard,
nor can they find escape from a wretched death, no,
right at the entrance, just in their native walls,
in the safe retreat of home they’re pierced by spears
and pant their lives away. Some shut the gates,
not daring to clear a safe way in for comrades,
beg as they will, and a ghastly bloodbath follows,
defenders killed at the entries, enemies flung on swords.
Shut out in front of their parents’ faces, eyes streaming tears,
some pitch headlong into the trenches, pressed by the rout,
/> some charge wildly, reins flying, ramming the gateways
blocked by the rugged posts.
And even mothers up on the ramparts strive—
their genuine love of country marks the way,
they’d seen Camilla fight—they hurl their weapons
with trembling hands, daring to do the work of iron
with pikes of rugged oak and poles charred hard.
Defending their city walls, they all burn
to be the first to die.
At the same time
the wrenching news hits Turnus still in the woods.
It arrives in force as Acca brings her commander
word of stark disaster: Volscian units routed,
Camilla fallen, enemy armies surging on, attacking
on all fronts, and Mars in his triumph, panic already
shakes the city walls. Turnus in all his fury—
that’s what the ruthless will of Jove demands—
abandons his hilltop ambush, quits the shaggy grove.
He was barely out of sight and about to range the plain
when captain Aeneas, moving through the exposed pass,
climbs the ridge and comes forth from the shady woods.
So now both men are speeding toward the walls—not many
strides between their armies marching in total strength.
Then, the moment Aeneas spied the dust storm swirling
down the plain and the long lines of Latian fighters,
Turnus spied Aeneas, savage in full armor, and caught
the tramp of marching infantry, battle stallions panting.
They would have clashed at once and tried their luck in war
but the ruddy Sun has plunged his weary team in the Western sea
and as daylight slips away he brings the nightfall on.
Now both armies come to a halt before the city,
building dikes to fortify their camps.
BOOK TWELVE
The Sword Decides All
Once Turnus sees his ranks of Latins broken in battle,
their spirits dashed and the war-god turned against them,
now is the time, he knows, for him to keep his pledge.
All eyes are fixed on him—his blood is up
and nothing can quench the fighter’s ardor now.
Think of the lion ranging the fields near Carthage . . .
the beast won’t move into battle till he takes
a deep wound in his chest from the hunters, then
he revels in combat, tossing the rippling mane on his neck
he snaps the spear some stalker drove in his flesh and
roars from bloody jaws, without a fear in the world.
The Aeneid Page 41