Aeneid III: A Translation in Alliterative Verse

Aeneid III: 588-654

And now another morning manifests at the start of sunrise

And Dawn dries the dewy shadows from the sky.

When suddenly the strange shape of a foreign fellow

Came from the copse, stricken with severe starvation,

In wretched rags, his hands stretched suppliant to the shore.

We see him: soiled with squalour and a bushy beard,

His tunic tied with thorns, but otherwise a gruesome Greek,

Once taken to Troy in his ancestral arms.

When he discerns the Dardan dress and Aenean arms afar,

He wavers a while, scared by the sight,

And pauses his progress; soon straight to the shore,

With weeping and wailing he shouts: "I swear by the stars,

By the Holy ones and heaven's life-giving light,

Take me, Trojans, lead me to any land,

That shall be sufficient. You know I am from the Danaon divisions,

And I confess to charging in combat the Ilian idols.

For which, if my wickedness's harm is too huge

Scatter me on the seas and drown me in the deep,

If I die it will delight me to depart by human hands."

He spoke, and stuck to our knees, kneeling on his own,

Who he was, by what blood born,

We urged him to utter, and what doom distressed him.

Ancient Anchises at once holds out his hand,

And confirms his courage with a prompt pledge.

Finally, his fear set aside, he speaks:

"I am an inhabitant of Ithaca, a comrade of unlucky Ulysses,

Named Acheminides of Adamastus: my parent being poor,

I travelled to Troy, if only that condition continued!

While trembling the terrible lintel they left,

My forgetful friends forsook me in the Cyclops' colossal cavern,

It is a cave of carnage and bloody banquets,

Deep and dark inside; he huge and hits the high heavens.

O Lords, from the land purge such a pest!

He is not easy on the eye, nor cordial to converse with.

He devours the viscera of victims and black blood,

I saw him seize two of our troop

In his huge hands, and reclining in the centre of his cave,

Smashed them on the stone, drowning the doorway in blood drops,

I saw him chew their corpses, flowing with foul fluid,

Their living limbs trembling in his teeth.

He did not avoid vengeance: Ulysses would not suffer such,

Nor Laertiades lapse in so colossal a crisis,

For once filled with his feast and loaded with liquor,

He dropped his drooping dome, and lay huge through the hollow,

Belching blood and mingled morsels

Wet with wine; to the great gods

We prayed to the powers and our parts picked, scattered round on all sides

And with a sharp stake we stab his huge headlamp,

Its single socket shrouded under his brutish brow,

As bulbous as a buckler or spherical as the sun,

And laughing at last we avenge the ashes of our allies.

O fly, forlorn ones, fly, and rend your ropes

From the sea shore.

For like Polyphemus, who pens fleecy flocks

In a hollow hole, and drains their dugs,

A hundred other horrors inhabit these sweeping shores,

And together traipse the high hills.

Thrice Hecate's horns have brimmed with brightness,

Since I eke out an existence amid the deserted dens

And burrows of beasts in the backwoods, and the colossal Cyclopes

From a scarp I see, and tremble at their tread and trumpeting.

The boughs give berries and scant sustenance,

And craggy cornels and creepers nourish with ripped roots.

Surveying all, I saw first this fleet

Sailing to shore. Whatever will happen,

I surrender: satisfied to flee those foul fiends,

I prefer you to put me to death however you deem."