No More Learning

Open now the gates of Helicon, goddesses, and stir the song of the band
that come the while with Aeneas from the Tuscan borders, and sail in
armed ships overseas.

First in the brazen-plated Tiger Massicus cuts the flood; beneath him
are ranked a thousand men who have left Clusium town and the city of
Cosae; their weapons are arrows, and light quivers on the shoulder, and
their deadly bow. With him goes grim Abas, all his train in shining
armour, and a gilded Apollo glittering astern. To him Populonia had
given six hundred of her children, tried in war, but Ilva three hundred,
the island rich in unexhausted mines of steel. Third Asilas, interpreter
between men and gods, master of the entrails of beasts and the stars in
heaven, of speech of birds and ominous lightning flashes, draws a
thousand men after him in serried lines bristling with spears, bidden to
his command from Pisa city, of Alphaean birth on Etruscan soil. Astyr
follows, excellent in beauty, Astyr, confident in his horse and glancing
arms. Three hundred more--all have one heart to follow--come from the
householders of Caere and the fields of Minio, and ancient Pyrgi, and
fever-stricken Graviscae.

Let me not pass thee by, O Cinyras, bravest in war of Ligurian captains,
and thee, Cupavo, with thy scant company, from whose crest rise the swan
plumes, fault, O Love, of thee and thine, and blazonment of his father's
form. For they tell that Cycnus, in grief for his beloved Phaethon,
while he sings and soothes his woeful love with music amid the shady
sisterhood of poplar boughs, drew over him the soft plumage of white old
age, and left earth and passed crying through the sky. His son, followed
on shipboard with a band of like age, sweeps the huge Centaur forward
with his oars; he leans over the water, and [196-227]threatens the
waves with a vast rock he holds on high, and furrows the deep seas with
his length of keel.

He too calls a train from his native coasts, Ocnus, son of prophetic
Manto and the river of Tuscany, who gave thee, O Mantua, ramparts and
his mother's name; Mantua, rich in ancestry, yet not all of one blood, a
threefold race, and under each race four cantons; herself she is the
cantons' head, and her strength is of Tuscan blood. From her likewise
hath Mezentius five hundred in arms against him, whom Mincius, child of
Benacus, draped in gray reeds, led to battle in his advancing pine.
Aulestes moves on heavily, smiting the waves with the swinging forest of
an hundred oars; the channels foam as they sweep the sea-floor. He sails
in the vast Triton, who amazes the blue waterways with his shell, and
swims on with shaggy front, in human show from the flank upward; his
belly ends in a dragon; beneath the monster's breast the wave gurgles
into foam. So many were the chosen princes who went in thirty ships to
aid Troy, and cut the salt plains with brazen prow.
And now day had faded from the sky, and gracious Phoebe trod mid-heaven
in the chariot of her nightly wandering: Aeneas, for his charge allows
not rest to his limbs, himself sits guiding the tiller and managing the
sails. And lo, in middle course a band of his own fellow-voyagers meets
him, the nymphs whom bountiful Cybele had bidden be gods of the sea, and
turn to nymphs from ships; they swam on in even order, and cleft the
flood, as many as erewhile, brazen-plated prows, had anchored on the
beach. From far they know their king, and wheel their bands about him,
and Cymodocea, their readiest in speech, comes up behind, catching the
stern with her right hand: her back rises out, and her left hand oars
her passage through the silent water. Then she thus [228-261]accosts
her amazed lord: 'Wakest thou, seed of gods, Aeneas? wake, and loosen
the sheets of thy sails. We are thy fleet, Idaean pines from the holy
hill, now nymphs of the sea. When the treacherous Rutulian urged us
headlong with sword and fire, unwillingly we broke thy bonds, and we
search for thee over ocean. This new guise our Lady made for us in pity,
and granted us to be goddesses and spend our life under the waves. But
thy boy Ascanius is held within wall and trench among the Latin weapons
and the rough edge of war. Already the Arcadian cavalry and the brave
Etruscan together hold the appointed ground. Turnus' plan is fixed to
bar their way with his squadrons, that they may not reach the camp. Up
and arise, and ere the coming of the Dawn bid thy crews be called to
arms; and take thou the shield which the Lord of Fire forged for victory
and rimmed about with gold. To-morrow's daylight, if thou deem not my
words vain, shall see Rutulians heaped high in slaughter. ' She ended,
and, as she went, pushed the tall ship on with her hand wisely and well;
the ship shoots through the water fleeter than javelin or windswift
arrow. Thereat the rest quicken their speed. The son of Anchises of Troy
is himself deep in bewilderment; yet the omen cheers his courage.