No More Learning

Indolence is your pleasure, your delight
the luxurious dance; you wear sleeved tunics and ribboned turbans. O
right Phrygian women, not even Phrygian men! traverse the heights of
Dindymus, where the double-mouthed flute breathes familiar music. The
drums call you, and the Berecyntian boxwood of the mother of Ida; leave
arms to men, and lay down the sword. '

As he flung forth such words of ill-ominous strain, Ascanius brooked it
not, and aimed an arrow on him from the stretched horse sinew; and as he
drew his arms asunder, first stayed to supplicate Jove in lowly vows:
'Jupiter omnipotent, deign to favour this daring deed. My hands shall
bear yearly gifts to thee in thy temple, and bring to stand before thine
altars a steer with gilded forehead, snow-white, carrying his head high
as his mother's, already pushing with his horn and making the sand fly
up under his feet. ' The Father heard and from a clear space of sky
thundered on the left; at once the fated bow rings, the grim-whistling
arrow flies from the tense string, and goes through the head of Remulus,
the steel piercing through from temple to temple. 'Go, mock valour with
insolence of speech! Phrygians twice taken return this answer to
Rutulians. ' Thus and no further Ascanius; the Teucrians respond in
cheers, and shout for joy in rising height of courage. Then haply in the
tract of heaven tressed Apollo sate looking down from his cloud on the
[640-673]Ausonian ranks and town, and thus addresses triumphant Iulus:
'Good speed to thy young valour, O boy! this is the way to heaven, child
of gods and parent of gods to be! Rightly shall all wars fated to come
sink to peace beneath the line of Assaracus; nor art thou bounded in a
Troy. ' So speaking, he darts from heaven's height, and cleaving the
breezy air, seeks Ascanius. Then he changes the fashion of his
countenance, and becomes aged Butes, armour-bearer of old to Dardanian
Anchises, and the faithful porter of his threshold; thereafter his lord
gave him for Ascanius' attendant.
In all points like the old man Apollo
came, voice and colour, white hair, and grimly clashing arms, and speaks
these words to eager Iulus:

'Be it enough, son of Aeneas, that the Numanian hath fallen unavenged
beneath thine arrows; this first honour great Apollo allows thee, nor
envies the arms that match his own. Further, O boy, let war alone. ' Thus
Apollo began, and yet speaking retreated from mortal view, vanishing
into thin air away out of their eyes. The Dardanian princes knew the god
and the arms of deity, and heard the clash of his quiver as he went. So
they restrain Ascanius' keenness for battle by the words of Phoebus'
will; themselves they again close in conflict, and cast their lives into
the perilous breach. Shouts run all along the battlemented walls;
ringing bows are drawn and javelin thongs twisted: all the ground is
strewn with missiles. Shields and hollow helmets ring to blows; the
battle swells fierce; heavy as the shower lashes the ground that sets in
when the Kids are rainy in the West; thick as hail pours down from
storm-clouds on the shallows, when the rough lord of the winds congeals
his watery deluge and breaks up the hollow vapours in the sky.

Pandarus and Bitias, sprung of Alcanor of Ida, whom woodland Iaera bore
in the grove of Jupiter, grown now [674-709]tall as their ancestral
pines and hills, fling open the gates barred by their captain's order,
and confident in arms, wilfully invite the enemy within the walls.
Themselves within they stand to right and left in front of the towers,
sheathed in iron, the plumes flickering over their stately heads: even
as high in air around the gliding streams, whether on Padus' banks or by
pleasant Athesis, twin oaks rise lifting their unshorn heads into the
sky with high tops asway. The Rutulians pour in when they see the
entrance open. Straightway Quercens and Aquicolus beautiful in arms, and
desperate Tmarus, and Haemon, seed of Mars, either gave back in rout
with all their columns, or in the very gateway laid down their life.
Then the spirits of the combatants swell in rising wrath, and now the
Trojans gather swarming to the spot, and dare to close hand to hand and
to sally farther out.

News is brought to Turnus the captain, as he rages afar among the routed
foe, that the enemy surges forth into fresh slaughter and flings wide
his gates. He breaks off unfinished, and, fired with immense anger,
rushes towards the haughty brethren at the Dardanian gate. And on
Antiphates first, for first he came, the bastard son of mighty Sarpedon
by a Theban mother, he hurls his javelin and strikes him down; the
Italian cornel flies through the yielding air, and, piercing the gullet,
runs deep into his breast; a frothing tide pours from the dark yawning
wound, and the steel grows warm where it pierces the lung. Then Meropes
and Erymas, then Aphidnus goes down before his hand; then Bitias,
fiery-eyed and exultant, not with a javelin; for not to a javelin had he
given his life; but the loud-whistling pike came hurled with a
thunderbolt's force; neither twofold bull's hide kept it back, nor the
trusty corslet's double scales of gold: his vast limbs sink in a heap;
earth utters a groan, and the great shield clashes [710-745]over him:
even as once and again on the Euboic shore of Baiae falls a mass of
stone, built up of great blocks and so cast into the sea; thus does it
tumble prone, crashes into the shoal water and sinks deep to rest; the
seas are stirred, and the dark sand eddies up; therewith the depth of
Prochyta quivers at the sound, and the couchant rocks of Inarime, piled
above Typhoeus by Jove's commands.