The sacrificial oxen are duly slain, and the libations poured at the tomb of Anchises; the bowls of new milk, of wine, and of blood, and the fresh spring flowers, which were reckoned acceptable offerings to the dead. Then Æneas lifts his voice in prayer to the shade of the hero, and a startling omen follows the invocation. A serpent, dappled with green and gold, glides out of the tomb, tastes of the offerings, and disappears again. Æneas sees in the creature the tutelary genius of the spot, or, it may be, the special attendant of his father’s shade. In either case, he accepts its appearance as a good omen, and joyfully redoubles his devotions. In the funeral games which follow, the Roman poet no doubt had two models in his mind. He was ambitious to reproduce, or perhaps to rival, in Roman, song, for an audience of his countrymen, the grand description which his great master Homer had given of the games which Achilles celebrates in honour of the dead Patroclus. He wished also, there can be little doubt, to pay a poet’s best compliment to his imperial patron, and to weave into his song, with such licence of embellishment as is allowed to all poets, a record of those funeral games which Augustus had instituted in remembrance of his uncle, the great Dictator Julius. But Virgil is here very far from being a mere copyist from Homer. In lieu of the chariot-race, the great feature in the games of the Iliad, he has given us a galley-race, the incidents of which are quite as exciting, and to our modern comprehensions more thoroughly intelligible. The day fixed for the great spectacle has arrived, and the Sicilians from far and near flock to it, some to take part in the games, and all to see. First of the various contests comes the galley-race, for which four of the fastest vessels in the fleet have entered--the Shark, the Centaur, the Chimæra, and the Scylla; each displaying, no doubt, as its figure-head, a representation of the monster whose name it bore. Their captains were men well known. Humouring a genealogical fancy of his Roman countrymen for tracing their descent to some one of the old Trojan colonists,--much after the fashion of English houses who try to find an ancestor on the Roll of Battle Abbey,--the poet tells us that three at least out of the four gave their names in due time to patrician houses in Rome. Mnestheus, who commands the Shark, left his name (certainly with considerable modification) to the _gens_ or clan of Memmius. The captain of the Centaur, Sergestus, is in like manner the reputed ancestor of the Sergian clan, as Cloanthus, who sails the Scylla, is of the Cluentian. Only Gyas, the captain of the Chimæra, a bulky craft, “as big as a town,” has no such genealogical honours assigned him.