irds
Defiled the day; and wild beasts were seen,[636]
Leaving the woods, lodge in the streets of Rome.
Cattle were seen that muttered human speech;
Prodigious births with more and ugly joints 560
Than nature gives, whose sight appals the mother;
And dismal prophecies were spread abroad:
And they, whom fierce Bellona's fury moves
To wound their arms, sing vengeance; Cybel's[637] priests,
Curling their bloody locks, howl dreadful things.
Souls quiet and appeas'd sighed from their graves;
Clashing of arms was heard; in untrod woods
Shrill voices schright;[638] and ghosts encounter men.
Those that inhabited the suburb-fields
Fled: foul Erinnys stalked about the walls, 570
Shaking her snaky hair and crooked pine
With flaming top; much like that hellish fiend
Which made the stern Lycurgus wound his thigh,
Or fierce Agave mad; or like Megaera
That scar'd Alcides, when by Juno's task
He had before look'd Pluto in the face.
Trumpets were heard to sound; and with what noise
An armed battle joins, such and more strange
Black night brought forth in secret. Sylla's ghost
Was seen to walk, singing sad oracles; 580
And Marius' head above cold Tav'ron[639] peering,
His grave broke open, did affright the boors.
To these ostents, as their old custom was,
They call th' Etrurian augurs: amongst whom
The gravest, Arruns, dwelt in forsaken Leuca[640]
Well-skill'd in pyromancy; one that knew
The hearts of beasts, and flight of wandering fowls.
First he commands such monsters Nature hatch'd
Against her kind, the barren mule's loath'd issue,
To be cut forth[641] and cast in dismal fires; 590
Then, that the trembling citizens should walk
About the city; then, the sacred priests
That with divine lustration purg'd the walls,
And went the round, in and without the town;
Next, an inferior troop, in tuck'd-up vestures,
After the Gabine manner; then, the nuns
And their veil'd matron, who alone might view
Minerva's statue; then, they that kept and read
Sibylla's secret works, and wash[642] their saint
In Almo's flood; next learned augurs follow; 600
Apollo's soothsayers, and Jove's feasting priests;
The skipping Salii with shields like wedges;
And Flamen