LXXIV. Aghast, AEneas listens to the cries. "O maid," he asks, "what crimes are theirs? What pain Do they endure? what wailings rend the skies?" Then she: "Famed Trojan, this accursed domain None chaste may enter; so the Fates ordain. Great Hecate herself, when here below She made me guardian of Avernus' reign, Led me through all the region, fain to show The tortures of the gods, the various forms of woe. LXXV. "Here Cretan Rhadamanthus, strict and stern, His kingdom holds. Each trespass, now confessed, He hears and punishes; each tells in turn The sin, with idle triumph long suppressed, Till death has bared the secrets of the breast. Swift at the guilty, as he stands and quakes, Leaps fierce Tisiphone, for vengeance prest, And calls her sisters; o'er the wretch she shakes The torturing scourge aloft, and waves the twisted snakes. LXXVI. "Then, opening slow, on horrid hinges grate The doors accursed. See'st thou what sentinel Sits in the porch? What presence guards the gate? Know, that within, still fiercer and more fell, Wide-yawning with her fifty throats, doth dwell A Hydra. Tartarus itself, hard by, Abrupt and sheer, beneath the ghosts in Hell, Gapes twice as deep, as o'er the earth on high Towers up the Olympian steep, the summit of the sky. LXXVII. "There roll the Titans, born of ancient Earth, Hurled to the bottom by the lightning's blast. There lie--twin monsters of enormous girth-- Aloeus' sons, who 'gainst Olympus cast Their impious hands, and strove with daring vast To disenthrone the Thunderer. There, again, The famed Salmoneus I beheld, laid fast In cruel agonies of endless pain, Who sought the flames of Jove with mimic art to feign, LXXVIII. "And mocked Olympian thunder. Torch in hand, Drawn by four steeds, through Elis' streets he came, A conqueror, borne in triumph through the land. And, waving high the firebrand, dared to claim The God's own homage and a godlike name. Blind fool and vain! to think with brazen clash And hollow tramp of horn-hoofed steeds, to frame The dread Storm's counterfeit, the thunder's crash, The matchless bolts of Jove, the inimitable flash. LXXIX. "But lo! his bolt, no smoky torch of pine, The Sire omnipotent through darkness sped, And hurled him headlong with the blast divine. There, too, lay Tityos, nine roods outspread, Nursling of earth. Hook-beaked, a vulture dread, Pecking the deathless liver, plied his quest, And probed the entrails and the heart, that bred Immortal pain, and burrowed in his breast. The torturing growth goes on, the fibres never rest.