“And now the site is chosen, and I am rearing a city’s walls and calling it Pergamia: the new nation is proud to bear the name of the old: I bid them love hearth and home, and raise and roof the citadel. Already the ships had been hauled up high and dry on the shore, the crews 20 were busied with marriage and tilling the new country, and I was appointing laws to live by, and houses to dwell in—when suddenly there came on the human frame a wasting sickness, shed from the whole tainted expanse of the sky, a piteous blight on trees and crops, a year charged with 25 death. There were men leaving the lives they loved, or dragging with them the bodies that burdened them, while Sirius baked the fields into barrenness, the herbage was parching, the corn was sickening, and would not yield its food. Back again to Phœbus and his Ortygian 30 oracle over the sea my father bids us go, and there sue for grace, asking the god to what haven he means to bring our overtoiled fortunes, whence he orders us to seek for help in our sufferings—whither to direct our course. “It was night and all living things on earth were in the 35 power of sleep, when methought the sacred images of the gods, the Phrygian household deities, whom I had borne away with me from Troy, even from the midst of the blazing town, stood before my eyes as I lay in slumber, clear in a flood of light, where the full moon was streaming through the windows of the house. Then they began to address me thus, and relieve my trouble with words like these: ‘The answer which Apollo has ready to give you when you 5 reach Ortygia, he delivers here, sending us, see, of his own motion to your very door. We, the followers of you and your fortune since Dardanland sunk in flame—we, the comrades of the fleet which you have been guiding over the swollen main—we it is that will raise to the stars the 10 posterity that shall come after you, and crown your city with imperial sway. Be it yours to build mighty walls for mighty dwellers, and not abandon the task of flight for its tedious length. Change your settlement: it is not this coast that the Delian god moved you to accept—not in 15 Crete that Apollo bade you sit down. No, there is a place—the Greeks call it Hesperia[150]—a land old in story, strong in arms and in the fruitfulness of its soil—the Œnotrians were its settlers. Now report says that later generations have called the nation Italian from the 20 name of their leader. That is our true home: thence sprung Dardanus and father Iasius, the first founder of our line. Quick! rise, and tell the glad tale, which brooks no question, to your aged sire; tell him that he is to look for Corythus[151] and the country of Ausonia. Jupiter bars you 25