Page:Homer - Iliad, translation Pope, 1909.djvu/283

Sat doubtful Conquest hovering on the field;
But when aloft he shakes it in the skies,
Shouts in their ears, and lightens in their eyes,
Deep horror seizes every Grecian breast,
Their force is humbled, and their fear confessed.
So flies a herd of oxen, scattered wide,
No swain to guard them, and no day to guide,
When two fell lions from the mountain come,
And spread the carnage through the shady gloom.
Impending Phœbus pours around them fear,
And Troy and Hector thunder in the rear.
Heaps fall on heaps: the slaughter Hector leads;
First, great Arcesilas, then Stichius bleeds;
One to the bold Boeotians ever dear,
And one Menestheus' friend, and famed compeer.
Medon and lasus, Æneas sped;
This sprung from Phelus, and the Athenians led;
But hapless Medon from Oïleus came;
Him Ajax honoured with a brother's name,
Though born of lawless love: from home expelled,
A banished man, in Phylace he dwelled,
Pressed by the vengeance of an angry wife;
Troy ends, at last, his labours and his life.
Mecystes next Polydamas o'erthrew;
And thee, brave Clonius! great Agenor slew.
By Paris, Deiochus inglorious dies,
Pierced through the shoulder as he basely flies.
Polites' arm laid Echius on the plain;
Stretched on one heap, the victors spoil the slain.
The Greeks dismayed, confused, disperse or fall,
Some seek the trench, some skulk behind the wall;
While these fly trembling, others pant for breath,
And o'er the slaughter stalks gigantic death.
On rushed bold Hector, gloomy as the night,
Forbids to plunder, animates the fight,
Points to the fleet: "For, by the gods, who flies,
Who dares but linger, by this hand he dies;
No weeping sister his cold eye shall close,
No friendly hand his funeral pyre compose.
Who stops to plunder at this signal hour,
The birds shall tear him, and the dogs devour."
Furious he said; the smarting scourge resounds,
The coursers fly, the smoking chariot bounds;
The hosts rush on; loud clamours shake the shore;
The horses thunder, earth and ocean roar:
Apollo, planted at the trench's bound,
Pushed at the bank; down sunk the enormous mound:
Rolled in the ditch the heapy ruin lay;
A sudden road, a long and ample way.