Bring to my mind, O Muse,[7] the causes—for what 10 treason against her godhead, or what pain received, the queen of heaven drove a man of piety so signal to turn the wheel of so many calamities, to bear the brunt of so many hardships! Can heavenly natures hate[8] so fiercely and so long? 15 Of old there was a city, its people emigrants from Tyre,[9] Carthage, over against Italy and Tiber’s mouths, yet far removed—rich and mighty, and formed to all roughness by war’s[10] iron trade—a spot where Juno, it was said, loved to dwell more than in all the world beside, 20 Samos[11] holding but the second place. Here was her armour, here her chariot—here to fix by her royal act the empire of the nations, could Fate be brought to assent, was even then her aim, her cherished scheme. But she had heard that the blood of Troy was sowing the seed of a 25 race to overturn one day those Tyrian towers—from that seed a nation, monarch of broad realms and glorious in war, was to bring ruin on Libya[12]—such the turning of Fate’s[13] wheel. With these fears Saturn’s[14] daughter, and with a lively memory of that old war which at first she had waged at Troy for her loved Argos’[15] sake—nor indeed had the causes of that feud and the bitter pangs they roused yet vanished from her mind—no, stored up 5 in her soul’s depths remains the judgment of Paris,[16] and the wrong done to her slighted beauty, and the race abhorred from the womb, and the state enjoyed by the ravished Ganymede.[17] With this fuel added to the fire, the Trojans, poor remnants of Danaan[18] havoc and 10 Achilles’[19] ruthless spear, she was tossing from sea to sea, and keeping far away from Latium; and for many long years they were wandering, with destiny still driving them, the whole ocean round. So vast the effort it cost to build up the Roman nation! 15