Aeneid III: A Translation in Alliterative Verse

Aeneid III: 655-718

Scarcely he spoke, when we see on the high hilltop,

Moving his mountainous mass among his snowy sheep,

The shepherd Cyclops, seeking the known shore,

A dreadful deformed demon, vast and robbed of vision,

A great pinetree guided and steadied his step,

His fleecy flock following, his sole solace

And comfort for his calamity.

After he came to the coast and sought the soaring swell,

He bathed the blood from his gouged globe,

Groaning and gnashing his teeth, he walked amid the water,

And the wave does not wet his tall thighs.

Shaking we speed our flight far from there,

Receiving the righteous refugee, and quietly cutting the cable,

Leaning we lash the seas with striving sculls.

He takes heed, and turns his tracks to the sound of speech,

But stripped of the strength to grab us in his grasp,

Nor managing to match the sea's power of pursuit,

He clamours a huge cry, at which the water and waves

Tremble, and terrifies the Latin lands,

And the volcano in vaulted grottos groans.

But the clan of Cyclopes from the high hills

And forests flew forth, filling the beach and bay.

We saw them standing futile, the furnace fraternity,

With a grim glare, holding their high heads to heaven,

A horrid horde, as tall oak trees

Or coniferous cypress crowd with proud peaks,

In Jove's great groves or Diana's dell.

Fierce fear forced us fast to release the rigging

And spread the sails to whatever willing winds.

But the prophet's prediction warns of the Wolf and the Whirlpool

Not to chart a course betwixt the twain

A short distance from death, we resolved to reverse the rigging.

Lo! a northerly from the narrow peak of Pelorus

Swells. I sail past the rough rock rim

Of Pantagia, Megara's mouth, and Thapsus lying low.

Acheminides, associate of unlucky Ulysses,

Showed us such shores, remaking his roamings in reverse.

A land lies against wave washed Plemyrium,

Stretched over a Sicilian shore, of old called Ortygia.

Rumour says the River god Alpheus of Arcadia,

Runs secret sluices beneath the briny,

And now with the Sicilian seas by your mouth mingles, Arethusa.

As ordered we honoured the great gods of this ground,

And thence I pass the plashy soil of stagnant Helorus.

Pachnya's projecting promontory and craggy cliffs

We coast, and Camarina, in the distance, decreed

Fixed by the Fates, and the Geloan grasslands

And great Gela named by its wide waterway.

Then ardous Acragas from afar reveals its royal ramparts,

Previously the producer of superb steeds,

And with the breezes blowing I leave leafy Selinus,

And trace Lilybeian's tideways, treacherous with buried boulders.

Here Drepanum's dock and sad shore secured me.

Here, tossed by so many tempests of the stormy sea,

Alas! Anchises, of all cares and concerns the consolation,

I lost, here you left me lagging, finest of fathers, in vain

Saved from so many difficult dangers.

And the prophet prince, who warned of much woe,

Did not see this sorrow, nor cruel Celaeno,

This was my last labour, the finish of my far-reaching flight.

Departing, a deity compelled me to your coasts.

Thus our ancestor Aeneas, alone told of his trip,

And divine decrees, with all attentive.

Finally he finishes, and the tale told, takes rest.