Virgil (Collins)/Aeneid 3
CHAPTER III.
ÆNEAS CONTINUES HIS NARRATIVE.
So, with his father and his infant son, and carrying with him the national gods and sacred fire of Troy, Æneas and the remnant of the Trojans had set forth upon their voyage for the unknown shores of Hesperia—the "Land of the West." Their first resting-place was on the friendly coast of Thrace, where Æneas laid the foundations of a city which was to hear his name. A strange adventure befell him there. While he was pulling some cornel-twigs which grew out of a mound, he found, to his horror, that the ends dropped blood. A third time, after prayer to avert the omen, he plucked a sapling, when a hollow voice from below warned him to desist from such cruelty. It is the grave of the unhappy Polydorus, a young son of Priam, whom his father, when Troy became hard pressed, had sent away with some of his treasures to the safe keeping of the king of Thrace, who for the sake of these treasures had basely murdered him. The cornel-wood spears with which he had been transfixed had taken root, and the blood had flowed from his body.[1] They did but wait to pay due honours to the shade of Polydorus, and then hastened from the accursed coast. Landing next on the sacred isle of Delos, they consulted the oracle there as to their future home. Apollo was as enigmatical as his wont—he bade them "seek out their ancient mother." They understood this to be spoken of the ancient cradle of their race; Anchises thought the phrase pointed to Crete, the birthplace of their ancestral hero Teucrus, and where stood the ancient Mount Ida, from which the mountain in the Troad derived its name. And Idomeneus, the king of Crete, who had joined the war against Troy, had been driven from his kingdom, and left a vacant throne.[2] To Crete they sailed, and there began to build a city, to be called Pergamia, after the citadel of Troy. But a year of deadly pestilence fell on man and beast; and in a dream Æneas saw the angry gods of Troy standing by him "in the full moonlight that streamed through the windows," and warning him that the promised land, the ancient home of their race, is not in Crete, but Hesperia—the "Land of the West"—whence came their forefather Dardanus. Then Anchises too remembered that such had been the frequent warning of Cassandra—the prophetess to whom none would listen. They re-embarked accordingly. After a storm of three days and three nights, when no pilot could keep the course, they were cast upon the islands of the Harpies[3]—the monster sisters, half women and half birds, foul and loathsome, who are hateful to gods and men. With them they had to do battle for the meal which they had spread; and one of those hags, in her wrath, prophesied that before they reached their promised Hesperia they should be forced "to eat their tables."
The description of the ensuing voyage, in Mr Conington's tasteful translation, reads like a passage from the 'Lord of the Isles,' yet presents a fair equivalent, especially in the last fine touch, to the Latin original:—
"The south wind freshens in the sail;
We hurry o'er the tide,
Where'er the helmsman and the gale
Conspire our course to guide;
Now rises o'er the foamy flood
Zacynthos, with its crown of wood,
Dulichium, Samè, Neritos,
Whose rocky sides the waves emboss;
The crags cf Ithaca we flee,
Laertes' rugged sovereignty;
Nor in our flight forget to curse
The land that was Ulysses' nurse."
They landed on the coast of Leucadia, at Actium—the scene, be it remembered, of Augustus's great naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra. Here, the Trojan chief takes care to say, he refreshed his weary crew with rest, and celebrated national games. Nay, he hung up there, fugitive as he was, a trophy of defiance—a shield which he had taken from a Greek hero, and inscribed upon it, "The spoil of Æneas from the conquering Argives." So speaks the poet; his Roman audience would recognise the Actian games, celebrated there every fifth year by order of Augustus in honour of his great victory; and Æneas's trophy is not so out of place as it might seem.
At Buthrotus, in Epirus, the wanderers had met with old friends. Andromache is settled there, now the wife of Helenus, who, by a strange vicissitude, has become the successor of Neoptolemus in his Greek province. There is little of what we call sentiment in these "heroic" times, especially as concerns "woman and her master." It grates upon the feelings of the reader who has in mind the pathetic scene between Hector and his wife in the Iliad of Homer, to be told here by the poet—told, too, as an ordinary incident, as in fact it was—that Andromache had become the property of the conqueror Neoptolemus, and that he, bent upon a marriage with Hermione, daughter of Helen and Menelaus, had handed over his Trojan wife—"Hector's Andromache," as she still pathetically calls herself—to her fellow-captive Helenus, Hector's brother. She tells her own sad story, not without some sense of its wretchedness—
"Ay—I am living; living still
Through all extremity of ill."
And she envies the fate of Polyxena, her sister-in-law, slain on the tomb of Achilles. Still, she has accepted her lot—the lot of so many women in her day. And Helenus, her present lord, is (if that be any consolation) a sort of king; for Orestes has killed Neoptolemus, and Helenus has in some way succeeded him, and built a new "Pergamus" in Greece. So that here, too, the poet would tell us, Troy has conquered her conquerors—a son of Priam reigns in the territory of Achilles. But the impression made upon an English mind as to Andromache's fate is, after all, that of degradation, and we gladly turn from the page which relates it.
Helenus, like his sister Cassandra, has the gift of prophecy; he had been the great authority on all such matters to his countrymen during the siege. He now read the omens for Æneas, at his request; all were favourable. The wanderers should reach the promised Hesperia; but that western land was further off than they thought, and their voyage would prove long and weary. When they reached it, they should find under a holm-oak a white sow with a litter of thirty young ones: there the new town was to be built—the "Alba Longa" which has already been forenamed in Jupiter's promise to Venus. Helenus dismissed them with good wishes and ample presents; Andromache making special gifts to the boy Ascanius, whose age and features remind the mother of her own lost Astyanax. Æneas's words of farewell are these:—
"Live, and be blest! 'tis sweet to feel
Fate's book is closed and under seal.
For us, alas! that volume stern
Has many another page to turn.
Yours is a rest assured: no more
Of ocean wave to task the oar;
No far Ausonia to pursue,
Still flying, flying from the view."
They set sail from this friendly shore, and on the following day caught their first sight of the shores of Italy. But though they landed and offered sacrifice to Juno, as Helenus had bid them do, they knew that this was not the spot on which they were to settle, and soon put to sea again. They passed the bay of Tarentum, escaping the dangers of Charybdis, and landed under Ætna, on the shore where dwell the Cyclops—the one-eyed race of giants, who, according to one legend, labour in their underground forges for Vulcan, the divine smith. Here the poet introduces us to a direct reminiscence of the wanderings of Ulysses. He adopts the whole of Homer's story—the visit of the Greek chief and his comrades to the cave of the giant Polyphemus, his cannibal meal, and the vengeance which Ulysses took upon him by burning out his eye.[4] Æneas relates how he met there with one of Ulysses' crew, who by some mischance had been left behind, and who had hid himself three months (so close is the date of the two voyages) from the clutches of Polyphemus and his fellow-Cyclops. They took the wretched fugitive on board, and put to sea again just in time to escape the blind monster, who waded into the sea after them at the sound of the oars. They skirted the coast of Sicily, and at Drepanum the chief had buried his father Anchises. It was on casting off from Sicily that he had been driven by the storm on this unknown coast of Libya, on the spot soon to be famous enough as the site of Carthage.
"So king Æneas told his tale,
While all beside were still—
Rehearsed the fortunes of his sail,
And Fate's mysterious will:
Then to its close his legend brought,
And gladly took the rest he sought."
- ↑ Horrible as the legend is, Spenser thought it worth adopting. The Red-Cross Knight, to make a garland for Fidessa, tears branches from the tree that had once been Fradubio.—'Faery Queen,' I. ii. 30.
- ↑ The story of Idomeneus, according to the old annotators upon Virgil, has a curious similarity to that of Jephthah. He had vowed that if he escaped from a storm at sea, he would offer in sacrifice the first thing that met him on lauding. It was his son. A plague followed, and his subjects expelled him.
- ↑ There is a fine description of these hags in Morris's 'Jason,' where the voyagers
"Beheld the daughters of the Earth and Sea,
The dreadful Snatchers, who like women were
Down to the breast, with scanty close black hair
About their heads, and dim eyes ringed with red,
And bestial mouths set round with lips of lead.
But from their gnarled necks there 'gan to spring
Half hair, half feathers, and a sweeping wing
Grew out instead of arm on either side,
And thick plumes underneath the breast did bide
The place where joined the fearful natures twain. - ↑ See Homer's Odyssey, p. 69.