you could escape my hands?” and with that he seizes him 10

as he hangs in air, and pulls him down with a great fragment

of the wall; just as the bearer of Jove’s thunder

trusses in his hooked talons a hare or a snow-white swan

and soars into the sky, or one of Mars’ wolves snatches

from the fold a lamb which its mother’s bleatings reclaim 15

in vain. On all sides rises the war-shout. They rush on

the trenches and fill them with shattered earthworks,

while others fling brazen firebrands to the roofs. Ilioneus

with a rock, broken from a mighty mountain, brings