who holds, and will hold me, I pray, forever,
nor will I violate my marriage vows
to Canens, daughter of immortal Janus,
as long as fate allows her to be mine.”
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“‘And when the Titan’s daughter realized
that her oft-repeated pleas had come to naught,
she said, “You will not stroll away from here,
returning to your Canens: no, you will learn
just what a woman scorned in love can do,
for Circe is a loving woman, scorned!”
“‘Then, after turning three times to the west
and three times to the east, she cast three spells
and struck the young man three times with her wand;
he fled, but was amazed to find himself
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running more swiftly now than usual;
he saw the feathers on his body, and, enraged
to find himself so suddenly transformed
into this new, unprecedented kind
of bird in his own woods of Latium,
he pecked at the rough oaks with his hard beak,
and angrily left wounds on their long limbs;
his wings took on the scarlet of his tunic,
the golden clasp he wore upon it changed
into bright feathers; a band of yellow gold
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encircled his neck; and now, but for his name,
nothing remained of Picus from before.
“‘Meanwhile, his comrades, who, with hue and cry
had searched the fields and not discovered him,
came upon Circe (for she’d cleared the air
and let the sun and winds disperse the clouds)
and rightly they accused her of her crime
against the king, demanding his return,
and making preparations to attack her
with their fierce weapons.
“‘Instead, she sprinkled them
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with noxious drugs and poisonous concoctions,
and summoning up Night and all his gods,
that dwell below in Erebus and Chaos,
she called upon the goddess Hecate
with long-drawn ululations.
“‘Astonishing
to say it, but the woods leapt from their place,
the earth shuddered, the nearby trees turned white,
and clumps of grass were stained with drops of blood;
stones seemed to bellow and wild dogs to bay,
the earth appeared to writhe with poison serpents,
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and ghostly forms to flutter all around.
“‘Astounded by these monstrous apparitions,
his comrades turned into a fearful mob;
she touched their faces—trembling, terrified—
with the magic wand by which these youths were changed
into a great variety of beasts;
and not a one of them kept his old shape.
“‘Phoebus, descending, had already bathed
the Spanish coast beyond the Western Gates,
and the spouse that Canens sought with eyes and heart
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was nowhere to be found: slaves and subjects
hastened through the forest, bearing torches;
nor did it seem sufficient to the nymph
to weep and tear her hair and beat her breast
(though she did all of these), but she herself
rushed off and wandered madly through the woods.
“‘Six days and nights observed her wandering
through hills and valleys just as Chance proposed,
without food or sleep; the Tiber was the last
to see her, worn by grief and wandering,
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laying her body down on its long bank;
and there she poured her heart out in her grief,
words mixed with tears in ever-fainter tones,
as when it happens that the swan will sing
his elegy himself before he dies.
“‘At last, attenuated so by grief
that in her bones the marrow turned to water,
she melted down and vanished on the breezes;
the place has kept alive her legend’s fame,
however, bearing even now the name
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of the nymph Canens, given by the Muses.’
“Many such things I saw and heard about
during that long year’s time, in which we grew
accustomed to our inactivity:
once more we were commanded to set sail;
Circe warned us of all that lay ahead:
a long journey on an uncertain path
and danger everywhere on that cruel sea.
I must confess that I was terrified,
and when we reached this shore, I stayed behind.”
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Acmon transformed
So Macareus ended his account,
and the ashes of the wet nurse of Aeneas,
sealed in a marble urn, were then interred
in a grave with these brief verses on the stone:
WITHIN, THE ASHES OF CAIËTA LIE:
MY FOSTER CHILD, KNOWN FOR HIS PIETY,
SNATCHED ME FROM GREEK FLAMES, THEN CREMATED ME WITH FITTING RITES AND GREAT PROPRIETY
The lines that bound them to the grassy shore
were loosed, and treachery left far behind
in the abode of that disreputable goddess:
they sought the wooded grove where gloomy Tiber
sends his sand-laden waters to the sea;
he won the throne and daughter of the king
of Latium, though not without a struggle,
for Turnus, raging, battled for the bride
he had been previously promised, and
war with a fierce race was undertaken,
as Etruria united against Latium,
and for a long time a hard victory
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was sought in the anxiety of arms.
Both sides increased the size of their own forces
with help from foreigners, and many men
guarded the Rutulian and Trojan camps.
Aeneas sued successfully for aid
from King Evander, although Venulus
was disappointed on his mission to the city
of the exiled Diomedes: he had founded
a great-walled city in Apulia,
the realm of Daunus, and he held the lands
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his bride had brought him as her dowry.
But after Venulus, at the behest of Turnus,
had gone to him and asked him for his help,
Diomedes answered that he lacked the troops,
and was unwilling to commit himself
or the forces of his father-in-law, either;
nor did he have a nation of his own
that he could mobilize: “Lest you should think
that my excuses to you are fictitious,
I will recount my bitter woes again,
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though each recital must renew my grief.
“When Ilium’s high towers had been burned,
and Troy had toppled into the Greek flames,
and after Ajax (who alone deserved
the punishment that all of us received
because he took a virgin from a virgin)
had sinned against Minerva, we poor Greeks
were taken by the winds and strewn all over
the hostile sea, whose wrath (and heaven’s too)
we bore in the forms of rainstorm, darkness, lightnings,
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till finally, the blow to end all blows:
the promontory at Caphereus!
“I will not long delay you, setting out
our woes in the order they occurred:
just say that even Priam would have wept
to see how Greece was faring at that time!
“Warlike Minerva kept me safe, however,
and delivered me from the tumultuous waves
into another sorrow, even worse:
I was expelled from my ancestral fields
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as kindly Venus settled an old score
with fresh new pain; and so oppressive were
the toils at sea and wars on land I bore
that often I would call men fortunate
who had been drowned in the storm we all endured
or had been shipwrecked on Caphereus,
and wished myself to have been one of them.
My comrades had endured the very worst
that wars and storms could offer, and they begged
that our wandering should have an end;
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but Acmon, an excitable young man,
made even more so by these trials, said,
“‘Is there still something you have not endured,’
he asked, ‘some grief you might decline to bear?
What is there that is left for her to do,
if she should wish to do more than she has?
As long as we fear something worse may come,
prayer has its place—but when the short straw’s drawn,
we put our fears behind us and below,
and hopelessness releases us from care.
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“‘So let her hear me saying this—so what?
So what if she despises, as she does,
all of the men who serve with Diomedes,
since all of us despise her attitude:
as far as we’re concerned!’
“Provocative,
those words of Acmon, and they angered Venus,
and brought her old anger back to life again.
“His bitter words pleased very few of us,
and the majority rebuked Acmon,
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who learned, when he attempted to reply,
that his throat and voice were both attenuated,
his hair had changed to feathers, and new plumage
concealed his recently remodeled neck;
his arms accepted even larger feathers,
and his sharp elbows turned gracefully to wings;
his feet were given over to webbed digits,
and his face hardened to inexpressive horn
that ended in a sharply pointed beak.
“Lycus, Idas, Rhexenor, Nycteus,
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and Abas, too, all stared at him in wonder,
and while they wondered, took on the same shape;
the greater part of them were changed to birds
and flew up all together as one flock,
encircling the oarsmen on flapping wings:
and if you wish to know what kind of bird
they had so swiftly been transformed into,
I’d have to say that though they weren’t swans,
they much resembled them, though these were white.
“And now that I am the son-in-law of Daunus,
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I hold—just barely—this new-founded town
and these dry fields with what few men are left.”
Here Diomedes finished his account.
The wild olive tree
Venulus left the realm of Calydon,
the realm of Peucetia and the fields
of Messapia, where he saw a cave
hidden in the forest dense and misty,
a screen of waving reeds that grew before it.
Goat-footed Pan now holds it as his own,
but at one time it was the lair of nymphs
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who had been driven off in terror by
the unexpected apparition of
an Apulian shepherd. But soon after,
the nymphs regained their lost composure, and,
with nothing but contempt for their pursuer,
they went back once again to nimble-footed
choral dancing.
Still the shepherd mocked them
with boorish imitations of their dancing,
and barnyard insults, and obscene expressions;
nor would he close his mouth until a tree
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sprang from his throat and covered up his face;
indeed, he is a tree now: by his fruits
you may know what kind, for the sour berries
of the wild olive show his language plain,
whose bitterness has entered into them.
The transformation of Aeneas’ ships
When the ambassadors returned with word
that the Aetolians refused to fight,
the Rutulians waged war without their help,
as they had planned, and both sides shed much blood.
But look! Where Turnus flings his greedy torches
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at hulls of pine, and ships spared by the waves
are terrified by fire! Vulcan now
burns pitch and wax and other foods for flames,
which leap from mast to mast, and the wooden thwarts
in the curved hulls are wreathed in acrid smoke!
Then the Holy Mother of the Gods recalled
that these pines had been felled upon the summit
of Mount Ida, and at once she filled the air
with the tintinnabulation of her cymbals
and the shrill ululation of her boxwood flutes;
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and lightly carried through the parting air
in a chariot drawn by her familiar lions,
the goddess cried, “Your sacrilegious hand
flings torches at these ships to no avail,
Turnus, for I will rescue them from danger:
I will not let your hungry flames devour
limbs that were mine, that grew in my own groves!”
The goddess was still speaking when it thundered,
and the thunder was immediately followed
by dancing hailstones mixed with falling rain;
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and the winds, like brothers in a civil war,
brought tumult and confusion to the air
and to the waves, so suddenly increased.
Cybele then selected one of these
to break the ropes that held the Trojan fleet,
the wood lost firmness and turned into flesh;
the curved prows changed to heads; oars turned to toes
and swimming legs; what had been sides still were,
and keels remained, though they were changed to spines;
790
lines softened into locks, sail yards to arms,
and the ships’ cerulean color stayed the same;
vessels that once were frightened by the waves
are naiads now and gambol in the water;
despite their hard beginnings on a mountain,
they now frequent the waves, untroubled by
old memories of their peak experience.
They do remember, though, their lives as ships,
and the dangers they so often faced at sea;
on which account, they often lend a hand
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to guide the keels of storm-tossed ships—unless
those ships should happen to belong to Greeks;
still mindful of the fall of Troy, they hate
that race entire, and rejoiced to see
the floating wreckage of Ulysses’ ship,
as they rejoiced to see the wooden vessel
of Alcinoüs transformed into stone.
The Heron
There was a hope that when the fleet had been
endowed with life as water nymphs, this wonder
would have inspired fear in the Rutulians,
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and make them end the war; but war continued,
since both sides each had gods supporting th
em,
and courage, which is just as good as gods;
they went on fighting not for a dowered kingdom,
not for the scepter in your father’s hand,
nor for you, even, fair Lavinia:
they fought to win and to avoid the shame
of having to surrender; finally,
Venus saw that the arms which she’d provided
brought her son victory; now Turnus fell,
820
and with him fell the city of Ardea,
called powerful while he lived to protect it,
but when the fire of barbarians
reduced it to a heap of tepid ashes,
there flew out from the middle of that mass
a swift-winged bird not previously known,
flapping its wings above the cinder heap;
its cry, its scrawniness, its sickly pallor
were fitting for a city that is captured,
and it has even kept the city’s name:
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[ardea is the Latin name for heron]
Ardea mourns itself with beating wings.
The deification of Aeneas
The manly excellence Aeneas showed
compelled the gods, including even Juno,
to put an end to their old enmity;
and now with Julus well set up and rising,
it was the proper time for our hero
to enter heaven; Venus had approached
the deities, soliciting approval,
and threw her arms about her father’s neck:
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“Father,” she said, “you’ve always been most kind;
now I beseech you to be even more so,
and for the sake of my own flesh and blood,
your grandson too, grant him divinity;
however small a portion does not matter,
as long as you give something! It is enough
that he has once seen the Unlovely Realm,
that he has once traversed the river Styx!”
The gods gave their assent, and even she,
Jove’s consort, now appeased, beamed her approval.
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The father of the gods said, “Both of you,
the seeker and the one for whom it is sought,
deserve the gift of immortality,
and so, my daughter, take what you would have.”
Venus thanked him and then was carried off
on the light breezes in a chariot
drawn by her team of yoked and harnessed doves
to the Laurentian coast, where the Numicius
weaves its way through a curtain of tall reeds,
then spills its waters in the nearby sea.
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She bade the river god to take Aeneas
under the surface of his silent stream
and cleanse him of all mortal deficits;
he did as she commanded, bathing him,
and having purged him of his mortal dross,
restored his best, immortal part to him.