Page:The Aeneid of Virgil JOHN CONINGTON 1917 V2.pdf/96

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  • ing town, stood before my eyes as I lay in slumber, clear in

a flood of light, where the full moon was streaming through the windows of the house. Then they began to address me thus, and relieve my trouble with words like these: 'The answer which Apollo has ready to give you when you 5 reach Ortygia, he delivers here, sending us, see, of his own motion to your very door. We, the followers of you and your fortune since Dardanland sunk in flame—we, the comrades of the fleet which you have been guiding over the swollen main—we it is that will raise to the stars the posterity that shall come after you, and crown your city with imperial sway. Be it yours to build mighty walls for mighty dwellers, and not abandon the task of flight for its tedious length. Change your settlement: it is not this coast that the Delian god moved you to accept—not in 15 Crete that Apollo bade you sit down. No, there is a place—the Greeks call it Hesperia[o]—a land old in story, strong in arms and in the fruitfulness of its soil—the Œnotrians were its settlers. Now report says that later generations have called the nation Italian from the 20 name of their leader. That is our true home: thence sprung Dardanus and father Iasius, the first founder of our line. Quick! rise, and tell the glad tale, which brooks no question, to your aged sire; tell him that he is to look for Corythus[o] and the country of Ausonia. Jupiter bars you 25 from the fields of Dicte.'[o] Thus astonished by visions and voices of heaven—for sleep it was not: no—methought I saw them face to face, their wreathed locks and their features all in full view; and a cold sweat, too, trickled down my whole frame. I leap from the bed, and 30 direct upturned hand and voice to heaven, and pour on the hearth the undefiled libation. The sacrifice paid, with joy I inform Anchises, and expound the whole from first to last. He owns the double pedigree and the rival ancestors, and his own new mistake about the two old countries. 35 Then he says: 'My son, trained in the school of Troy's destiny, Csasandra's was the one voice which used to chant to me of this chance. Now I recollect, this was the