Tuesday, October 2, 2007

Aeneid lines 1.297-324 (class translation)

He says these things and sends down the son of Maia from the sky, in order that the lands and the new citadels of Carthage would lie open in welcome to the Teucrians, lest Dido, unaware of fate, keep (him) from her territory. That one flies through the great air on the oarage of his wings, and quickly stood on the shores of Libya. And already he obeys his commands, and the Phoenicians put aside their fierce hearts with the god willing; among the first, the queen accepts a quiet spirit and a benign mind toward the Teucrians.

But pious Aeneas, considering many things through the night, as soon as the kindly light appeared, decided to leap up and explore the new places (and) to ask what shores he had reached by the wind, who held them, whether men or wild beast, for he saw they were uncultivated, and to carry back his discoveries to his allies. He hides his fleet in a dome of forest under a hollowed out cliff, closed around by trees and by trembling shade. He himself attended by Achates alone proceeds, brandishing a pair of spears with wide iron tips in his hand. To whom his mother, in his way in the middle of the forest, took herself, bearing the face and clothing of a maiden and the arms of a Spartan maiden, or of such as the Thracian girl Harpalyce, wearing down her horses and outstripping the swift Hebrus with her course. For she had hung her bow handily from her shoulder by custom as a huntress, and she had given her hair to the winds to scatter; (she is) bare at the knee and has collected her flowing robes into a knot. And she speaks first, “Ho there, young men! Tell me if you have seen any of my sisters wandering here, by chance, girt with a quiver and the hide of a dappled lynx or pressing the course of a foaming boar with a shout.”

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