Ebook Vergil's Æneid

1. Thou also, Caieta, nurse of Æneas, hast conferred in thy death everlasting fame on our shores: even now thy glory guards thy last home, and thy name marks in mighty Hesperia the spot where thy bones are laid, if that glory be aught. But the good Æneas having duly performed her obsequies, and having raised a mighty funeral-pile, when the deep sea had calmed down, sails on his course and leaves the port behind. Favouring breezes blow far into the night, and the bright moon does not forbid their voyage; the sea glitters beneath her quivering beams. Next they skirt the shores of the land of Circe, where the glorious daughter of the Sun makes the groves, which no man may approach, ring with her ceaseless singing, and in her stately halls burns the fragrant cedar-wood, to give her light by night as she drives the shrill sley through the fine web. Hence were borne to their ears the wrathful roaring of lions fretting at their bonds and moaning late into the night; and bristly boars, too, and bears raged fiercely in their cages, and there howled shapes like great wolves, whom the cruel Goddess Circe, by her potent drugs, had invested with the face and body of wild beasts, depriving them of human form. And that the pious Trojans might not suffer such monstrous transformation should they be carried into these harbours, and might not land on these dread shores, Neptune filled their sails with fair breezes and enabled them to escape, and bore them past the seething shallows.