The Aeneid by Virgil; Bernard Knox; Robert Fagles

Author:Virgil; Bernard Knox; Robert Fagles
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: European Literary Fiction
ISBN: 9780143106296
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Published: 2010-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

With those words on his lips, he gave his wife

the embraces both desired, then sinking limp

on her breast he courted peaceful sleep

that stole throughout his body.

And then,

when the first deep rest had driven sleep away

and the chariot of Night had wheeled past mid-career,

that hour a housewife rises, faced with scratching out

a living with loom and Minerva’s homespun crafts,

and rakes the ashes first to awake the sleeping fires,

adding night to her working hours, and sets her women

toiling on at the long day’s chores by torchlight—

and all to keep the bed of her husband chaste

and rear her little boys—so early, briskly,

in such good time the fire-god rises up

from his downy bed to labor at his forge.

Not far

from Aeolian Lipare flanked by Sicily’s coast,

an island of smoking boulders surges from the sea.

Deep below it a vast cavern thunders, hollowed out

like vaults under Etna, forming the Cyclops’ forges.

You can hear the groaning anvils boom with mighty strokes,

the hot steel ingots screeching steam in the cavern’s troughs

and fires panting hard in the furnace—Vulcan’s home,

it bears the name Vulcania.

Here the firegod dove from heaven’s heights.

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