The expedition passed one night in great terror and dread in the vicinity of Mount Etna, where they had landed. The awful eruptions of smoke, and flame, and burning lava, which issued at midnight from the summit of the mountain,—the thundering sounds which they heard rolling beneath them, through the ground, and the dread which was inspired in their minds by the terrible monsters that dwelt beneath the mountains, as they supposed, and fed the fires, all combined to impress them with a sense of unutterable awe; and as soon as the light of the morning enabled them to resume their course, they made all haste to get away from so appalling a scene. At another time they touched upon a coast which was inhabited by a race of one-eyed giants,—monsters of enormous magnitude and of remorseless cruelty. They were cannibals,—feeding on the bodies of men whom they killed by grasping them in their hands and beating them against the rocks which formed the sides of their den. Some men whom one of these monsters, named Polyphemus, had shut up in his cavern, contrived to surprise their keeper in his sleep, and though they were wholly unable to kill him on account of his colossal magnitude, they succeeded in putting out his eye, and Æneas and his companions saw the blinded giant, as they passed along the coast, wading in the sea, and bathing his wound. He was guiding his footsteps as he walked, by means of the trunk of a tall pine which served him for a staff.
At length, however, after the lapse of a long period of time, and after meeting with a great variety of adventures to which we can not even here allude, Æneas and his party reached the shores of Italy, at the point which by divine intimations had been pointed out to them as the place where they were to land.[D]
Remarks on the story of Æneas.
The story of the life and adventures of Æneas, which we have given in this and in the preceding chapters, is a faithful summary of the narrative which the poetic historians of those days recorded. It is, of course, not to be relied upon as a narrative of facts; but it is worthy of very special attention by every cultivated mind of the present day, from the fact, that such is the beauty, the grace, the melody, the inimitable poetic perfection with which the story is told, in the language in which the original record stands, that the narrative has made a more deep, and widespread, and lasting impression upon the human mind than any other narrative perhaps that ever was penned.
Chapter VI.
The Landing in Latium.
B.C. 1197-1190
Latium was the name given to an ancient province of Italy, lying south of the Tiber. At the time of Æneas's arrival upon the coast it was an independent kingdom. The name of the king who reigned over it at this period was Latinus.