Here and there Virgil gives us delightful little sea-cameos which show how keenly the ancients exulted in their ships, and raced them against each other past rock and cliff, through wind and spume. What, for example, could be more interesting than the account of the race of the four galleys in the fifth book of the Æneid? He gives you the names of the swift _Pristis_, the huge _Chimæra_, which with her triple arrangement of oars was so big that she seemed like a floating town, the _Centaur_, and the dark blue _Scylla_. He draws for you the picture of the captains standing at the sterns, the crew taking their seats at the oars and waiting in eager breathlessness for the trumpet to start them on their race. Almost you can see the strong arms being drawn up to the breast and thrust smartly away again. The blue _Scylla_ wins, but it is a splendid struggle. The little touches of the ship which was “swifter than wind or flying arrow speeds towards land,” and of the disabled galley which moves slowly (like to a snake which has been run over), yet hoists her canvas and enters the harbour’s mouth “with full sails,” are pencilled in by a man who must have often watched a galley doing her work. He speaks of the lofty sterns which these galleys possessed, of Palinurus the pilot bidding his men to reef the sails at the gathering of a “dark storm of rain, bringing with it gloom and foul weather,” and gives orders to “labour at their strong oars, and sidewards turn the sails to meet the wind.” Evidently with the squall came a shift of wind, so that instead of being able to run with the breeze free, under sail power alone, they were now compelled to come on a wind, shorten canvas, and get out oars to prevent such shallow-draught vessels from drifting to leeward. And in a later passage Æneas, after the sea has calmed down, “bids all the masts quickly to be raised, and on the sailyards the sails to be stretched. All at once veered the sheet, and loosened the bellying canvas to right, to left; at once they all turn up and down the tall ends of the sailyards; favouring breezes bear the fleet along. Foremost before them all, Palinurus led the close line; with an eye to him the rest were bid to direct their course. And now damp night had just reached the centre of its course in the heavens; the sailors, stretched on their hard seats beneath the oars, had relaxed their limbs in quiet repose.”