Page:Homer - Iliad, translation Pope, 1909.djvu/292

Think of each ancestor with glory dead;
Absent, by me they speak, by me they sue;
They ask their safety and their fame from you:
The gods their fates on this one action lay,
And all are lost if you desert the day."
He spoke, and round him breathed heroic fires;
Minerva seconds what the sage inspires.
The mist of darkness Jove around them threw
She cleared, restoring all the war to view:
A sudden ray shot beaming o'er the plain,
And shewed the shores, the navy, and the main.
Hector they saw, and all who fly or fight,
The scene wide opening to the blaze of light.
First of the field, great Ajax strikes their eyes,
His port majestic, and his ample size:
A ponderous mace, with studs of iron crowned,
Full twenty cubits long, he swings around.
Nor fights like others fixed to certain stands,
But looks a moving tower above the bands;
High on the decks, with vast gigantic stride,
The godlike hero stalks from side to side.
So when a horseman from the watery mead,
Skilled in the manage of the bounding steed,
Drives four fair coursers, practised to obey,
To some great city through the public way;
Safe in his art, as side by side they run,
He shifts his seat, and vaults from one to one;
And now to this, and now to that he flies;
Admiring numbers follow with their eyes.
From ship to ship thus Ajax swiftly flew,
No less the wonder of the warring crew;
As furious, Hector thundered threats aloud,
And rushed enraged before the Trojan crowd;
Then swift invades the ships, whose beaky prores
Lay ranked contiguous on the bending shores.
So the strong eagle from his airy height,
Who marks the swans' or cranes' embodied flight,
Stoops down impetuous, while they light for food!,
And stooping darkens with his wings the flood.
Jove leads him on with his almighty hand,
And breathes fierce spirits in his following band.
The warring nations meet, the battle roars,
Thick beats the combat on the sounding prores.
Thou wouldst have thought, so furious was their fire,
Nor force could tame them, and no toil could tire;
As if new vigour from new fights they won,
And the long battle was but then begun.
Greece, yet unconquered, kept alive the war,
Secure of death, confiding in despair;