The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10): Stories from the Classics
General
The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10): Stories from the Classics
Children's stories; Classical literature -- Adaptations
Æneas and his companion next viewed a region named the Fields of
Mourning,--a wide tract, with shady paths and thick myrtle groves,
dedicated to those who had died through unrequited love, and were held to
have been emancipated by the miseries they had endured on earth from
suffering any punishment below. Here were to be seen, wandering
disconsolately, many women of whom Æneas had heard in old legends of
Greece and Troy. Among them he beheld, with sorrow and pity, the
ill-starred Queen of Carthage, the wound she had herself inflicted yet
gaping in her fair bosom. "Dido!" he exclaimed with tears, "was it then a
true rumor that reached me of your having died after my departure, and by
your own hand? If I have been the cause of your death, I am indeed
unhappy. By all I hold sacred, fair queen, I swear to you that it was
against my own will I quitted Carthage. The will of the Gods, which now
has brought me, while yet living, into these melancholy realms, drove me
from you; but I dreamt not that our separation would bring upon you such
extreme suffering. Why will you not speak to me? Why do you fly from me?
Never again will the Fates permit us to meet together." But all his
entreaties and his tears were vain. The spectre gazed upon him awhile with
eyes of inexorable hate, and then turned away, with a gesture of
unrelenting aversion, to a shady recess near by, where she was joined by
the ghost of her first lord, Sichæus, who by the compassion of Pluto had
been permitted to bear her company. Æneas resumed his journey, pondering
sadly over the fate of the woman who but a little since had loved him so
ardently and to whom he had unwillingly brought such misfortunes. He and
his guide now came to a place dedicated to the shades of renowned
warriors. Here he saw numbers of those brave Trojans, once his companions
in arms, who had fallen before Troy. They eagerly crowded around him,
pressed his hands, and questioned him as to the circumstances which had
brought him, while yet alive, amongst them. There, too, were many Greeks
who had perished during the Trojan war; but when they beheld the hero in
the flesh, and wearing his gleaming armor, they fled from him in dismay.
As he passed on, after exchanging affectionate words with many of his old
comrades, he met Deïphobus, that son of Priam who, after the death of
Paris, became the husband of Helen. The spectre of the prince was cruelly
mutilated,--so that Æneas scarcely knew him. "Who, O Deïphobus," he
exclaimed, "could have inflicted such shameful wounds upon you? After I
had escaped from Troy a story was brought to me that you had indeed
perished, but honorably and in fair fight, having slain many of the enemy.
Then I erected in your honor an empty tomb on the shore under Mount Ida,
and offered proper funeral rites, for your body I was unable to find."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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