Aeneid

​These were the cliffs, these the dreadful rocks Helenus was foretelling.

”Rescue yourselves, O comrades, and together rise upon your oars!”

​No less than commanded do they perform, and first Palinurus turned the groaning prow toward the left waves.

​All the cohort sought the left with oars and winds.

​We are raised to the sky by the bending whirlpool, and again, the wave being withdrawn, we sank down to the lowest Manes.

​Thrice the cliffs gave a roar among the hollow rocks;

​thrice we saw the shattered foam and the dripping stars.

​Meanwhile the wind with the sun left us weary,

​and ignorant of the way, we glide to the shores of the Cyclopes.

​The harbor itself is unmoved by the approach of the winds and is immense; but nearby Etna thunders with horrific ruins;

​and sometimes it erupts a black cloud to the sky,

​smoking with a pitch-black whirlwind and glowing ash,

​and raises globes of flames and licks the stars;

​sometimes eructating it raises the rocks and torn-out entrails of the mountain, and with a groan heaps up liquefied stones into the air, and boils from its lowest depth.

​The story is that the body of Enceladus, half-burned by lightning, is pressed down by this mass, and that huge Etna placed over him breathes out flame from its ruptured furnaces;

​and as often as he changes his weary side, all Trinacria trembles with a rumble, and veils the sky with smoke.

​That night, sheltered by the woods, we endure the monstrous portents, nor do we see what cause gives the sound.

​For there were neither fires of stars, nor was the sky bright with starry ether, but there were clouds in a dark heaven,

​and dead of night held the moon in a rain-cloud.

​And now the following day was rising with the first star of morning, and Aurora had removed the damp shadow from the sky:

​when suddenly from the woods, wasted by extreme hunger, a strange shape of an unknown man and pitiable in his plight

​comes forward, and stretches suppliant hands to the shores.

​We look back: there was dreadful filth and a long-grown beard, his garment fastened with thorns; but in all else he was a Greek,

​And when he saw from afar the Dardanian dress and Trojan arms, terrified a little by the sight, he stood hesitant

​and stayed his step; soon he bore himself headlong to the shores with weeping and prayers:

”By the stars I adjure you,

​by the gods above and this breathable light of heaven,

​take me away, O Trojans; carry me to whatever lands;

​this will be enough. I know myself to be one of the Greek fleet,

​and I confess that I attacked the Trojan Penates in war;

​for which, if the injury of our crime is so great, scatter me into the waves and drown me in the vast sea.

​If I perish, it will be a pleasure to have perished by the hands of men.”

​He had spoken, and clasping our knees and rolling at our knees, he clung. To speak who he is, from what blood sprung,

​we urge him, and then to confess what fortune harasses him.

​Father Anchises himself, having delayed not much, gives his right hand to the youth, and reassures his mind with the immediate pledge.

​He speaks these words, his fear at last laid aside:

”I am from the homeland Ithaca, a companion of unhappy Ulysses, Achaemenides by name, having set out for Troy, my father Adamastus

​being poor—and would that that fortune had remained!

​Here my companions, unmindful, left me in the vast cave of the Cyclops, while they left the cruel thresholds in trembling.

​It is a house of gore and bloody feasts, dark within, and huge; he himself is towering, and strikes the high stars—O gods, avert such a plague from the earth!—

​nor easy to be looked upon, nor affable in speech to anyone.

​He feeds on the entrails of the wretched and on dark blood.

​I myself saw, when he broke two bodies from our number, grasped in his huge hand, lying back in the middle of the cave,

​against a rock, and the thresholds swam, splashed with gore; I saw when he chewed the limbs dripping with black blood,

​and the warm limbs trembled under his teeth.

​Not with impunity, indeed; nor did Ulysses suffer such things, nor did the Ithacan forget himself in so great a crisis.

​For as soon as, filled with food and buried in wine, he rested his bent neck, and lay through the cave

​immense, vomiting gore and pieces mixed with bloody wine in his sleep, we, having prayed to the great divinities

​and distributed our parts by lot, poured around him from all sides at once, and with a sharp weapon bored his eye,

​huge, which lay solitary under his grim brow, like an Argolic shield or the lamp of Phoebus.”