“He sings the wanderings of the moon, The sun eclipsed in deadly swoon; Whence humankind and cattle came, And whence the rain-spout and the flame, Arcturus and the two bright bears, And Hyads weeping showery tears; Why winter suns so swiftly go, And why the winter nights move slow.” All the while, during the song and the banquet, the queen is fondling the fair boy, who sits next to her. Unhappy Dido! it is Cupid, the god of love, who, at his false mother’s bidding, has assumed the shape of Æneas’s young son. The true Ascanius lies fast bound in an enchanted sleep, by Venus’s machinations, in her bower in the far island of Cythera; and the Tyrian queen is nursing unawares in her bosom the passion which is to be her ruin. Æneas has already become an object of tender interest to her. She hangs upon his lips, like Desdemona on Othello’s:-- “Much of great Priam asks the dame, Much of his greater son; Now in what armour Memnon came, Now how Achilles shone.” Above all, she begs of him to tell his own story--his escape and his seven years’ wanderings. And Æneas begins; and, with an exact imitation of Homer’s management of his story, like Ulysses in the court of Alcinous, retraces his adventures from the last fatal night of Troy. CHAPTER II. ÆNEAS RELATES THE FALL OF TROY. It has been said that this poem is a kind of supplement to the Iliad. Æneas tells us what was not there told by Homer, but what is presupposed in his Odyssey,--the later history of the siege and capture of Troy. He relates at length the stratagem of the Wooden Horse, by which the Greeks at last outwitted their enemies. The fleet, which had seemed to sail for home, had withdrawn, and lay concealed in the harbour of Tenedos. The wooden fabric--dedicated to Minerva, as the tale went--was left standing outside the city. It was suggested to bring it within the walls, when the priest Laocoon rushed to prevent it--suspecting some such stratagem as in truth had been contrived. He even hurled his spear against its side, and might have thus made a beginning of its destruction, when behold, a prisoner was brought in. It was the treacherous Sinon; a Greek who had undertaken to play the dangerous part of a double spy. The tale he told his captors was this: that he, though a Greek, was a fugitive from Greek vengeance--especially from the hated Ulysses. He had been fixed upon as a victim to propitiate the offended gods; for there had come an oracle from Apollo, that as the blood of a virgin had to be shed to propitiate the gales on the expedition to Troy, so blood--that of a Greek--must purchase their return. Ulysses had contrived that Sinon should be the victim, and it was to escape this doom that he had thus fled.