Long-haired Iopas on his gilded lyre fills the chamber with songs
ancient Atlas taught; he sings of the wandering moon and the sun's
travails; whence is the human race and the brute, whence water and fire;
of Arcturus, the rainy Hyades, and the twin Oxen; why wintry suns make
such haste to dip in ocean, or what delay makes the nights drag
lingeringly. Tyrians and Trojans after them redouble applause.
Therewithal Dido wore the night in changing talk, alas! and drank long
draughts of love, asking many a thing of Priam, many a thing of Hector;
now in what armour the son of the Morning came; now of what fashion were
Diomede's horses; now of mighty Achilles. 'Nay, come,' she cries, 'tell
to us, O guest, from their first beginning the treachery of the
Grecians, thy people's woes, and thine own wanderings; for this is now
the seventh summer that bears thee a wanderer over all the earth and
sea.'

BOOK SECOND

THE STORY OF THE SACK OF TROY

All were hushed, and sate with steadfast countenance; thereon, high from
his cushioned seat, lord Aeneas thus began:

'Dreadful, O Queen, is the woe thou bidst me recall, how the Grecians
pitiably overthrew the wealth and lordship of Troy; and I myself saw
these things in all their horror, and I bore great part in them. What
Myrmidon or Dolopian, or soldier of stern Ulysses, could in such a tale
restrain his tears! and now night falls dewy from the steep of heaven,
and the setting stars counsel to slumber. Yet if thy desire be such to
know our calamities, and briefly to hear Troy's last agony, though my
spirit shudders at the remembrance and recoils in pain, I will essay.

'Broken in war and beaten back by fate, and so many years now slid away,
the Grecian captains build by Pallas' divine craft a horse of
mountainous build, ribbed with sawn fir; they feign it vowed for their
return, and this rumour goes about. Within the blind sides they
stealthily imprison chosen men picked out one by one, and fill the vast
cavern of its womb full with armed soldiery.

'There lies in sight an island well known in fame, Tenedos, rich of
store while the realm of Priam endured, [23-55]now but a bay and
roadstead treacherous to ships. Hither they launch forth, and hide on
the solitary shore: we fancied they were gone, and had run down the wind
for Mycenae. So all the Teucrian land put her long grief away. The gates
are flung open; men go rejoicingly to see the Doric camp, the deserted
stations an