Saturday, February 23, 2008

Aeneid lines 6.77-123 (class translation)

But the prophetess, no longer enduring immense Phoebus, rages in her cave, as if she were able to shake off the great god from her heart, but that one tires her frenzied mouth by so much more, mastering her fierce feelings, and trains [her] with his control. And now the hundred huge entrances of the home have opened by their own accord and they carry the answers of the prophetess through the heavens: “O you who have finished the great dangers of the sea (but there remain more serious [dangers] of the land) the Trojans will come into the Lavinian kingdoms (send from your heart this anxiety), but they will wish they had not come. Wars, awful wars, and the Tiber foaming with much blood I see. The Simois and Xanthus and a Doric camp will not be lacking for you; already another Achilles has been produced in Latium, and he too himself born of a goddess; nor will a Juno to harass the Teucri ever be gone, when you are a suppliant in times of want, what races, what cities of the Italians will you not have begged? The cause of such evil for the Teucrians will again be a foreign bride and again foreign bedchambers. You, do not yield to evils but in return go more boldly by which (way) your fortune allows you. The first way of safety, which you would suppose least, lies open from a Greek city.” Such things having been said from her shrine, the Cumaean Sibyl sings terrifying mysteries, and in her cave she roars, wrapping true things with obscurities: Apollo shakes these reins against the raging one and turns spurs under her chest.

As soon as the rage ceased and the frenzied face calmed, the hero Aeneas begins: "No new aspect of my labors rises unexpectedly; I have anticipated and traversed everything in my mind already before. I ask one thing: because it is said that here is the entrance to the infernal king and the shadowy swamp from Acheron having welled up, let it be permitted to me to go to the sight and face of my dear father; teach the way and open the sacred entrances. I snatched that man through flames and a thousand pursuing weapons on these shoulders and rescued (him) from the middle of the enemy; that man, companion to my journey, bore all the seas with me and all the threats both of sea and sky, weak, beyond the strength and lot of old age. Nay even the same man begging keeps giving orders that I seek you and approach your thresholds as a suppliant. I pray, kind one, pity both the son and his father (for you can (do) all things, and not in vain did Hecate put you in charge of Avernus’ groves), if Orpheus was able to summon the shades of his wife relying on his Thracian lyre and tuneful strings, if Pollux redeems his brother with alternating death and goes and returns so often (on) the path. Why of Theseus, why am I to tell of great Hercules? And my race is from greatest Jove.”

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