“Can such deep hate find place in breasts divine?”[16]
She had another reason, too, for her present jealous feelings. The city of Carthage, where she was especially honoured, she had hoped to make the mistress of the world. And now—so the inexorable Fates have woven it in their web—this new brood from Troy are to destroy it in the years to come. Rome, and not Carthage, the Roman poet would thus convey to his readers, is to have this universal empire.
But they have not reached Latium yet, these hateful Trojans. They never shall. The Queen of Heaven betakes herself to the King of the Winds, where he sits enthroned in his Homeric island of Æolia, controlling his boisterous subjects:—
“They with the rock’s reverberant roar
Chafe blustering round their prison door:
He, throned on high, the sceptre sways,
Controls their moods, their wrath allays.
Break but that sceptre, sea and land
And heaven’s ethereal deep
Before them they would whirl like sand,
And through the void air sweep.”
At Juno’s request Æolus lets loose his prisoners. Out rush the winds in mad delight.
“All in a moment, sun and skies
Are blotted from the Trojans’ eyes:
Black night is brooding o’er the deep,
Sharp thunder peals, live lightnings leap:
The stoutest warrior holds his breath,
And looks as on the face of death.
At once Æneas thrilled with dread;
Forth from his breast, with hands outspread,
These groaning words he drew:
‘O happy thrice, and yet again,
Who died at Troy like valiant men,
E’en in their parents’ view!
O Diomed, first of Greeks in fray,
Why passed I not the plain that day,
Yielding my life to you,
Where, stretched beneath a Phrygian sky,
Fierce Hector, tall Sarpedon, lie:
Where Simois tumbles ’neath his wave
Shields, helms, and bodies of the brave?’”
The fleet is scattered in all directions: some ships are cast on the rocks; one goes down with all its crew before their leader’s eyes. But Neptune, the sea-god, comes to the rescue. Friendly to the Trojans, as Juno is hostile to them, he resents the interference of the King of the Winds in his dominions—he knows by whose instance he has dared this outrage. He summons the offending winds, and chides them with stern authority:—
“Back to your master instant flee,
And tell him, not to him but me
The imperial trident of the sea
Fell by the lot’s award;
His is that prison-house of stone,
A prison, Eurus, all your own;
There let him lord it to his mind,
The jailer-monarch of the wind,
But keep its portal barred.”
So the tempest is stilled, and Æneas, with seven ships, the survivors of his fleet of twenty, runs into a land-locked harbour on the coast of Carthage. The crews light a fire, and grind and parch their corn, while Æneas goes farther inland to reconnoitre, and kills deer to mend their meal. Wine they have good store of—the parting gift from King Acestes, late their host in Sicily. The chief, though in sad anxiety as to the fate of his absent comrades, speaks to the rest in words of good cheer:—
“You that have seen grim Scylla rave,
And heard her monsters yell,—
You that have looked upon the cave
Where savage Cyclops dwell,—
Come, cheer your souls, your fears forget;
This suffering may yield us yet
A pleasant tale to tell.”