Venus has not been neglectful of her son. She has persuaded Vulcan to forge for him weapons and armour of such sort as only the immortal smith can make. The fire-god can never resist her blandishments; and he goes down to the forge where the Cyclops are ever at work, in the caverns beneath the Lipari Islands, off the coast of Sicily. There is much business in hand there already. Some of the one-eyed workmen are forging bolts for Jupiter, composed of four elements,-- “Three rays they took of forky hail, Of watery cloud three rays, Three of the wingèd southern gale, Three of the ruddy blaze.”[41] Some are finishing a war-chariot for Mars; others are shaping an ægis for Minerva--a shield of dragon’s scales and rings of gold. But their master bids them put all these tasks aside; War, and Wisdom, and even Government itself, must be content to come to a standstill, until the behests of Beauty have been obeyed. The idea of the Shield of Æneas, which Venus comes and lays before him while he sleeps, is of course borrowed directly from Homer’s Shield of Achilles. But the working out of it is quite original. Vulcan’s subject, in this case, is not, as in the Shield of the Iliad, an epitome of human life, but a prophetic history of Rome. The whole passage in which it is elaborately described is of remarkable beauty even to our modern taste, and upon a Roman’s ear and imagination must have had a wonderful effect. The story is told in eight (or perhaps nine) compartments, filled with the leading events in the great city’s existence. The two first contain the birth of Romulus, and the union of the Romans with the Sabines, which began with the seizure of the Sabine women:-- “There too the mother-wolf he made In Mars’s cave supinely laid: Around her udders undismayed The gamesome infants hung, While she, her loose neck backward thrown, Caressed them fondly, one by one, And shaped them with her tongue. Hard by, the towers of Rome he drew And Sabine maids in public view Snatched ’mid the Circus games: So ’twixt the fierce Romulean brood And Tatius with his Cures rude A sudden war upflames. And now the kings, their conflict o’er, Stand up in arms Jove’s shrine before, From goblets pour the sacred wine, And make their peace o’er bleeding swine.” The doom of Mettius the Alban, and the keeping of the Tiber bridge by Horatius against Lars Porsena, occupy the two next compartments. Next comes the defence of the Capitol against the Gauls by Manlius:--