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Notes Display Latin text | translated by Theodore C. Williams Book IV Chapter 21: Preparations of Dido's death | Next chapter Return to index Previous chapter |
Soon as the funeral pyre was builded high in a sequestered garden, looming huge with boughs of pine and faggots of cleft oak, the queen herself enwreathed it with sad flowers and boughs of mournful shade; and crowning all she laid on nuptial bed the robes and sword by him abandoned; and stretched out thereon a mock Aeneas; -- but her doom she knew. Altars were there; and with loose locks unbound the priestess with a voice of thunder called three hundred gods, Hell [Note 1], Chaos, the three shapes of triple Hecate, the faces three of virgin Diana. She aspersed a stream from dark Avernus drawn, she said; soft herbs were cut by moonlight with a blade of bronze, oozing black poison-sap; and she had plucked that philter from the forehead of new foal before its dam devours. Dido herself, sprinkling the salt meal, at the altar stands; one foot unsandalled, and with cincture free, on all the gods and fate-instructed stars, foreseeing death, she calls. But if there be some just and not oblivious power on high, who heeds when lovers plight unequal vow, to that god first her supplications rise. Note 1: Hell = Erebus Event: Love and Death of Dido |
504-521 At regina, pyra penetrali in sede sub auras erecta ingenti taedis atque ilice secta, intenditque locum sertis et fronde coronat funerea; super exuuias ensemque relictum effigiemque toro locat haud ignara futuri. stant arae circum et crinis effusa sacerdos ter centum tonat ore deos, Erebumque Chaosque tergeminamque Hecaten, tria uirginis ora Dianae. sparserat et latices simulatos fontis Auerni, falcibus et messae ad lunam quaeruntur aenis pubentes herbae nigri cum lacte ueneni; quaeritur et nascentis equi de fronte reuulsus et matri praereptus amor. ipsa mola manibusque piis altaria iuxta unum exuta pedem uinclis, in ueste recincta, testatur moritura deos et conscia fati sidera; tum, si quod non aequo foedere amantis curae numen habet iustumque memorque, precatur. |