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Notes Display Latin text Display Dutch text | Ovid XIV Chapter 2: 75-100 Aeneas journeys to Cumae | Next chapter Return to index Previous chapter |
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When the oarsmen of the Trojan ships had escaped Scylla, and rapacious Charybdis, when they had almost reached the Ausonian shore, the wind carried them to the coast of Libya. There Sidonian Queen Dido took Aeneas into her heart and home, she, who was fated not to endure her Phrygian husband's [Note 1] departure. She stabbed herself with his sword, on a blazing pyre, that was built as if it were intended for sacred rites, deceiving, as she had been deceived. Fleeing from the new city, Carthage, and its sandy shores, and carried back to the home of his loyal half-brother Acestes, son of Venus of Eryx, Aeneas sacrificed there, and paid honours at his dead father's, Anchises', tomb. Then he loosed the ships, that Iris almost destroyed by fire, at Juno's command, and passed the Aeolian Islands, smoking with clouds of hot sulphur, the kingdom of Aeolus,son of Hippotes, and passed the rocky isle of the Sirens, the daughters of Acheloüs. Bereft of its pilot, Palinurus, he follows the coast by Inarime, Prochyte, and Pithecusae, on its barren hill, named after its inhabitants, from pithecium, a little ape. For the father of the gods, Jupiter, hating the lying and deceit of the Cercopes, and the crimes of that treacherous people, changed them into disgraceful creatures, so that, though unlike men, they should seem like them. He contracted their limbs, turned up and blunted their noses, and furrowed their faces with the wrinkles of old age. Their bodies completely covered by yellow hair, he sent them, as monkeys, to this place, but not before he had robbed them of the power of speech, and those tongues born for dreadful deceit, leaving them only the power to complain in raucous shrieks. Note 1: husband = Sychaeus Events: Scylla and Charybdis, Dido falls in love with Aeneas, Love and Death of Dido, The Cercopes |