Book 8
on turf-built couch of green, most honoring
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Aeneas by a throne of maple fair
decked with a lion's pelt and flowing mane.
Then high-born pages, with the altar's priest,
bring on the roasted beeves and load the board
with baskets of fine bread; and wine they bring —
of Ceres and of Bacchus gift and toil.
While good Aeneas and his Trojans share
the long whole ox and meats of sacrifice.
When hunger and its eager edge were gone,
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Evander spoke: “This votive holiday,
yon tables spread and altar so divine,
are not some superstition dark and vain,
that knows not the old gods, O Trojan King!
But as men saved from danger and great fear
this thankful sacrifice we pay. Behold,
yon huge rock, beetling from the mountain wall,
hung from the cliff above. How lone and bare
the hollowed mountain looks! How crag on crag
tumbled and tossed in huge confusion lie!
A cavern once it was, which ran deep down
into the darkness. There th' half-human shape
of Cacus made its hideous den, concealed
from sunlight and the day. The ground was wet
at all times with fresh gore; the portal grim
was hung about with heads of slaughtered men,
bloody and pale—a fearsome sight to see.
Vulcan begat this monster, which spewed forth
dark-fuming flames from his infernal throat,
and vast his stature seemed. But time and tide
brought to our prayers the advent of a god
to help us at our need. For Hercules,
divine avenger, came from laying low
three-bodied Geryon, whose spoils he wore
exultant, and with hands victorious drove
the herd of monster bulls, which pastured free
along our river-valley. Cacus gazed
in a brute frenzy, and left not untried
aught of bold crime or stratagem, but stole
four fine bulls as they fed, and heifers four,
