Aeneas (Legendary character) -- Poetry; Epic poetry, Latin -- Translations into English
'Meanwhile Anchises bade the fleet set their sails, that the fair wind
might meet no delay. Him Phoebus' interpreter accosts with high
courtesy: "Anchises, honoured with the splendour of Venus' espousal, the
gods' charge, twice rescued from the fallen towers of Troy, lo! the land
of Ausonia is before thee: sail thou and seize it. And yet needs must
thou float past it on the sea; far away lies the quarter of Ausonia that
is revealed of Apollo. Go," he continues, "happy in thy son's affection:
why do I run on further, and delay the rising winds in talk?" Andromache
too, sad at this last parting, brings figured raiment with woof of gold,
and a Phrygian scarf for Ascanius, and wearies not in courtesy, loading
him with gifts from the loom. "Take these too," so says she, "my child,
to be memorials to thee of my hands, and testify long hence the love of
Andromache wife of Hector. Take these last gifts of thy kinsfolk, O sole
surviving likeness to me of my own Astyanax! Such was he, in eyes and
hands and features; and now his equal age were growing into manhood like
thine."
'To them as I departed I spoke with starting tears: "Live happily, as
they do whose fortunes are perfected! We are summoned ever from fate to
fate. For you there is rest in store, and no ocean floor to furrow, no
ever-retreating Ausonian fields to pursue. You see a pictured Xanthus,
and a Troy your own hands have built; with better omens, I pray, and to
be less open to the Greeks. If ever I enter Tiber and Tiber's bordering
fields, and see a city granted to my nation, then of these kindred towns
[503-537]and allied peoples in Epirus and Hesperia, which have the same
Dardanus for founder, and whose story is one, of both will our hearts
make a single Troy. Let that charge await our posterity."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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