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Aeneas, with the foremost of his captains and fair Iulus, lay them down
under the boughs of a high tree and array the feast. They spread wheaten
cakes along the sward under their meats--so Jove on high prompted--and
crown the platter of corn with wilding fruits. Here haply when the rest
was spent, and scantness of food set them to eat their thin bread, and
with hand and venturous teeth do violence to the round cakes fraught
with fate and spare not the flattened squares: _Ha! Are we eating our
tables too? _ cries Iulus jesting, and stops. At once that accent heard
set their toils a limit; and at once as he spoke his father caught it
from his lips and hushed him, in amazement at the omen. Straightway
'Hail, O land! ' he cries, 'my destined inheritance! and hail, O
household gods, faithful to your Troy! here is home; this is our native
country. For my father Anchises, now I remember it, bequeathed me this
secret of fate: "When hunger shall drive thee, O son, to consume thy
tables where the feast fails, on the unknown shores whither thou shalt
sail; then, though outwearied, hope for home, and there at last let
thine hand remember to set thy house's foundations and bulwarks. " This
was [128-162]the hunger, this the last that awaited us, to set the
promised end to our desolations . . . Up then, and, glad with the first
sunbeam, let us explore and search all abroad from our harbour, what is
the country, who its habitants, where is the town of the nation.
Now
pour your cups to Jove, and call in prayer on Anchises our father,
setting the wine again upon the board. ' So speaks he, and binding his
brows with a leafy bough, he makes supplication to the Genius of the
ground, and Earth first of deities, and the Nymphs, and the Rivers yet
unknown; then calls on Night and Night's rising signs, and next on Jove
of Ida, and our lady of Phrygia, and on his twain parents, in heaven and
in the under world. At this the Lord omnipotent thrice thundered sharp
from high heaven, and with his own hand shook out for a sign in the sky
a cloud ablaze with luminous shafts of gold. A sudden rumour spreads
among the Trojan array, that the day is come to found their destined
city. Emulously they renew the feast, and, glad at the high omen, array
the flagons and engarland the wine.

Soon as the morrow bathed the lands in its dawning light, they part to
search out the town, and the borders and shores of the nation: these are
the pools and spring of Numicus; this is the Tiber river; here dwell the
brave Latins. Then the seed of Anchises commands an hundred envoys
chosen of every degree to go to the stately royal city, all with the
wreathed boughs of Pallas, to bear him gifts and desire grace for the
Teucrians. Without delay they hasten on their message, and advance with
swift step. Himself he traces the city walls with a shallow trench, and
builds on it; and in fashion of a camp girdles this first settlement on
the shore with mound and battlements. And now his men had traversed
their way; they espied the towers and steep roofs of the Latins, and
drew near the wall. Before the city boys and men in their early
[163-196]bloom exercise on horseback, and break in their teams on the
dusty ground, or draw ringing bows, or hurl tough javelins from the
shoulder, and contend in running and boxing: when a messenger riding
forward brings news to the ears of the aged King that mighty men are
come thither in unknown raiment. He gives orders to call them within his
house, and takes his seat in the midst on his ancestral throne. His
house, stately and vast, crowned the city, upreared on an hundred
columns, once the palace of Laurentian Picus, amid awful groves of
ancestral sanctity. Here their kings receive the inaugural sceptre, and
have the fasces first raised before them; this temple was their
senate-house; this their sacred banqueting-hall; here, after sacrifice
of rams, the elders were wont to sit down at long tables. Further, there
stood arow in the entry images of the forefathers of old in ancient
cedar, Italus, and lord Sabinus, planter of the vine, still holding in
show the curved pruning-hook, and gray Saturn, and the likeness of Janus
the double-facing, and the rest of their primal kings, and they who had
borne wounds of war in fighting for their country. Armour besides hangs
thickly on the sacred doors, captured chariots and curved axes,
helmet-crests and massy gateway-bars, lances and shields, and beaks torn
from warships.