Helenus, like his sister Cassandra, has the gift of prophecy; he had been the great authority on all such matters to his countrymen during the siege. He now read the omens for Æneas, at his request; all were favourable. The wanderers should reach the promised Hesperia; but that western land was further off than they thought, and their voyage would prove long and weary. When they reached it, they should find under a holm-oak a white sow with a litter of thirty young ones: there the new town was to be built--the “Alba Longa” which has already been forenamed in Jupiter’s promise to Venus. Helenus dismissed them with good wishes and ample presents; Andromache making special gifts to the boy Ascanius, whose age and features remind the mother of her own lost Astyanax. Æneas’s words of farewell are these:-- “Live, and be blest! ’tis sweet to feel Fate’s book is closed and under seal. For us, alas! that volume stern Has many another page to turn. Yours is a rest assured: no more Of ocean wave to task the oar; No far Ausonia to pursue, Still flying, flying from the view.” They set sail from this friendly shore, and on the following day caught their first sight of the shores of Italy. But though they landed and offered sacrifice to Juno, as Helenus had bid them do, they knew that this was not the spot on which they were to settle, and soon put to sea again. They passed the bay of Tarentum, escaping the dangers of Charybdis, and landed under Ætna, on the shore where dwell the Cyclops--the one-eyed race of giants, who, according to one legend, labour in their underground forges for Vulcan, the divine smith. Here the poet introduces us to a direct reminiscence of the wanderings of Ulysses. He adopts the whole of Homer’s story--the visit of the Greek chief and his comrades to the cave of the giant Polyphemus, his cannibal meal, and the vengeance which Ulysses took upon him by burning out his eye.[24] Æneas relates how he met there with one of Ulysses’ crew, who by some mischance had been left behind, and who had hid himself three months (so close is the date of the two voyages) from the clutches of Polyphemus and his fellow-Cyclops. They took the wretched fugitive on board, and put to sea again just in time to escape the blind monster, who waded into the sea after them at the sound of the oars. They skirted the coast of Sicily, and at Drepanum the chief had buried his father Anchises. It was on casting off from Sicily that he had been driven by the storm on this unknown coast of Libya, on the spot soon to be famous enough as the site of Carthage. “So king Æneas told his tale, While all beside were still-- Rehearsed the fortunes of his sail, And Fate’s mysterious will: Then to its close his legend brought, And gladly took the rest he sought.” CHAPTER IV. DIDO.