Fortune and inevitable Destiny planted here; at my back were the awful hests[o] of my mother, the nymph Carmentis, and the divine sanction of Apollo." Scarce had he finished, when moving on he points out the altar and the Carmental gate, as the Romans call it, their ancient 5 tribute to the nymph Carmentis, the soothsaying seer, who first told of the future greatness of Æneas' sons and of the glories of Pallanteum. Next he points out a mighty grove, which fiery Romulus made the Asylum of a later day, and embowered by the chill dank rock, the Lupercal, 10 bearing after Arcadian wont the name of Lycæan Pan. He shows, moreover, the forest of hallowed Argiletum, and appeals to the spot, and recounts the death of Argus, once his guest. Thence he leads the way to the Tarpeian temple, even the Capitol, now gay with gold, then rough 15 with untrimmed brushwood. Even in that day the sacred terrors of the spot awed the trembling rustics; even then they shuddered at the forest and the rock. "This wood," he says, "this hill with the shaggy brow, is the home of a god of whom we know not; my Arcadians believe that 20 they have seen there great Jove himself, oft and oft, shaking with his right hand the shadowy Ægis[o] and calling up the storm. Here, too, in these two towns, with their ramparts overthrown, you see the relics and the chronicles of bygone ages. This tower was built by father 25 Janus, that by Saturn; the one's name Janiculum, the other's Saturnia." So talking together they came nigh the palace where Evander dwells in poverty, and saw cattle all about lowing in the Roman forum and Carinæ's luxurious precinct. When they reached the gate, "This 30 door," said the host, "Alcides in his triumph stooped to enter; this mansion contained his presence. Nerve yourself, my guest, to look down on riches, and make your own soul, like his, such as a god would not disdain, and take in no churlish sort the welcome of poverty." He 35 said, and beneath the slope of his narrow roof ushered in the great Æneas, and laid him to rest on a couch of leaves and the skin of a Libyan bear.
