out whom all the Greek
battalions range; and without my preventing care, the flames ere this
had made them their portion, and the hostile sword drunk their blood.
Not the hated face of the Laconian woman, Tyndarus' daughter; not Paris
is to blame; the gods, the gods in anger overturn this magnificence, and
make Troy topple down. Look, for all the cloud that now veils thy gaze
and dulls mortal vision with damp encircling mist, I will rend from
before thee. Fear thou no commands of thy mother, nor refuse to obey her
counsels. Here, where thou seest sundered piles of masonry and rocks
violently torn from rocks, and smoke eddying mixed with dust, Neptune
with his great trident shakes wall and foundation out of their places,
and upturns all the city from her base. Here Juno in all her terror
holds the Scaean gates at the entry, and, girt with steel, calls her
allied army furiously from their ships. . . . Even now on the citadel's
height, look back! Tritonian Pallas is planted in glittering halo and
Gorgonian terror. Their lord himself pours courage and prosperous
strength on the Grecians, himself stirs the gods against the arms of
Dardania. Haste away, O son, and put an end to the struggle. I will
never desert thee; I will set thee safe in the courts of thy father's
house."

'She ended, and plunged in the dense blackness of the night. Awful faces
shine forth, and, set against Troy, divine majesties . . .

'Then indeed I saw all Ilium sinking in flame, and Neptunian Troy
uprooted from her base: even as an ancient ash on the mountain heights,
hacked all about with steel and fast-falling axes, when husbandmen
emulously strain to cut it down: it hangs threateningly, with shaken top
and quivering tresses asway; till gradually, overmastered with
[631-662]wounds, it utters one last groan, and rending itself away,
falls in ruin along the ridge. I descend, and under a god's guidance
clear my way between foe and flame; weapons give ground before me, and
flames retire.

'And now, when I have reached the courts of my ancestral dwelling, our
home of old, my father, whom it was my first desire to carry high into
the hills, and whom first I sought, declines, now Troy is rooted out, to
prolong his life through the pains of exile.

'"Ah, you," he cries, "whose blood is at the prime, whose strength
stands firm in native vigour, do you take your flight. . . . Had the
lords of heaven willed to prolong life for me, they should have
preserve