Aeneid Book 7, Lines 511 - 528

The Fury Allecto blows the alarm

by Virgil

In another development engineered by Juno and the Fury Allecto to set the Italians and Aeneas’s Trojans at odds, Aeneas’s son Iulus has in his ignorance unwisely shot a beloved pet stag belonging to King Latinus’s steward and his daughter. They are outraged: now the Fury Allecto herself calls the country people to arms with a superhumanly powerful horn-blast. Aeneas’s prospects of peaceful settlement and an alliance by marriage to King Latinus are beginning to recede rapidly.

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At saeva e speculis tempus dea nacta nocendi
ardua tecta petit stabuli et de culmine summo
pastorale canit signum cornuque recurvo
Tartaream intendit vocem, qua protinus omne
contremuit nemus et silvae insonuere profundae;
audiit et Triviae longe lacus, audiit amnis
sulfurea Nar albus aqua fontesque Velini,
et trepidae matres pressere ad pectora natos.
tum vero ad vocem celeres, qua bucina signum
dira dedit, raptis concurrunt undique telis
indomiti agricolae; nec non et Troia pubes
Ascanio auxilium castris effundit apertis.
direxere acies. non iam certamine agresti,
stipitibus duris agitur sudibusve praeustis,
sed ferro ancipiti decernunt atraque late
horrescit strictis seges ensibus aeraque fulgent
sole lacessita et lucem sub nubila iactant.

Seeing from her vantage the time for mischief come,
the savage Goddess lights on the steep stable roof, and
right at the top sounds the shepherds’ alarm, shrills
a hellish note on the curved horn, at which at once
the whole grove shakes and the woods ring to their
very roots; the lake of Trivia heard far away, river Nar,
white with sulphurous water, heard, and the springs of Velinus: fearful mothers held their sons to their breast.
Swiftly, from all sides, snatching up weapons, the fearless
countryfolk converge on the note, where the dire horn
sounded the alarm: the youth of Troy, too, pours
to Ascanius’s aid through the camp’s open gates.
Both formed their lines. This was no rustic brawl,
fought with stout sticks and fire-hardened stakes;
they settle things with two-edged steel, and a dark
crop of drawn swords bristles wide: challenged by the sun,
bronze shines and flings its light to the clouds above.

`

More Poems by Virgil

  1. Cassandra is taken
  2. The farmer’s starry calendar
  3. Palinurus the helmsman is lost
  4. Virgil predicts a forthcoming birth and a new golden age
  5. The battle for Priam’s palace
  6. Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
  7. Vulcan’s forge
  8. A Fury rouses Turnus to war
  9. The Trojan horse opens
  10. Aeneas tours the site of Rome
  11. How Aeneas will know the site of his city
  12. Aeneas joins the fray
  13. Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
  14. The portals of sleep
  15. New allies for Aeneas
  16. The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
  17. Virgil’s perils on the sea
  18. Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
  19. The Trojans reach Carthage
  20. The death of Euryalus and Nisus
  21. The infant Camilla
  22. King Mezentius meets his match
  23. Aeneas arrives in Italy
  24. Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
  25. King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
  26. Aeneas and Dido meet
  27. Aeneas’s oath
  28. Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
  29. Into battle
  30. Rumour
  31. Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
  32. Turnus is lured away from battle
  33. The journey to Hades begins
  34. The death of Priam
  35. The death of Dido.
  36. Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse
  37. Dido’s release
  38. Turnus the wolf
  39. Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
  40. Love is the same for all
  41. Catastrophe for Rome?
  42. Sea-nymphs
  43. The Harpy’s prophecy
  44. Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
  45. Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
  46. Signs of bad weather
  47. Charon, the ferryman
  48. Aeneas prepares for a hopeless fight
  49. Laocoon and the snakes
  50. Virgil begins the Georgics
  51. Rites for the allies’ dead
  52. Juno’s anger
  53. Aeneas rescues his Father Anchises
  54. Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
  55. The Aeneid begins
  56. Storm at sea!
  57. The death of Priam
  58. Dido falls in love
  59. Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
  60. Aeneas’s ships are transformed
  61. Jupiter’s prophecy
  62. The Syrian hostess
  63. The farmer’s happy lot
  64. Aristaeus’s bees
  65. More from Virgil’s farming Utopia
  66. The death of Pallas
  67. In King Latinus’s hall
  68. Dido’s story
  69. The natural history of bees
  70. Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
  71. Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
  72. Mourning for Pallas
  73. The Trojan Horse enters the city
  74. Turnus at bay
  75. Aeneas is wounded
  76. Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
  77. Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story
  78. Juno is reconciled
  79. Juno throws open the gates of war
  80. Mercury’s journey to Carthage
  81. What is this wooden horse?
  82. Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
  83. Omens for Princess Lavinia
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