Italian frontier. Thou canst make brothers of one soul take arms and fight; canst make peaceful homes dens of strife; thou canst gain entrance for the scourge and the funeral torch: thou hast a thousand names, a thousand means of ill. Stir up that prolific bosom, snap the formed 5 bands of peace, scatter the incentives of war, let the nation in the same moment desire, demand, and seize the sword."
So then Allecto, empoisoned with Gorgon venom, first repairs to Latium and the lofty halls of the Laurentine monarch, and sits down before the hushed chamber of 10 queen Amata,[o] who, as she mused on the arrival of the Trojans and Turnus' bridal hopes, was glowing and seething with all a woman's passion, a woman's spleen. Snatching a snake from her dark venomed locks, she hurls it at her, and lodges it in the bosom close to the very heart, that, 15 maddened by the pest, she may drive the whole house wild. In glides the reptile unfelt, winding between the robe and the marble breast, and beguiles her into frenzy, breathing into her lungs its viperous breath; the linked gold round her neck turns to the monstrous serpent; so does the festoon 20 of her long fillet; it twines her hair, it slides smoothly from limb to limb. And while the first access of contagion, stealing in with clammy poison, is pervading her senses and threading her bones with flame, ere yet the soul has caught fire through the whole compass of the bosom, she 25 speaks with gentle plaint, as mothers wont, shedding many tears over her child and the Phrygian alliance: "And are fugitives from Troy to take Lavinia in marriage, good father? have you no compassion for your daughter and yourself? none for her mother, whom with the first fair 30 gale the faithless pirate will leave and make for the deep, carrying off his maiden prey? Ay, things were not so when the Phrygian shepherd stole into Lacedæmon, and bore away Leda's Helen to Troy town. Where is your pledged faith? where your old tenderness for your own 35 blood, and your hand plighted so oft to your kinsman Turnus? If Latian folk must have a son-in-law fetched from a foreign stock, and this is unalterably fixed, and
