I clasped my sword-belt round me once again,
fitted my left arm to my shield, and turned
to fly the house; but at the threshold clung
Creusa to my knees, and lifted up
Iulus to his father's arms. “If thou
wouldst rush on death,” she cried, “O, suffer us
to share thy perils with thee to the end.
But if this day's work bid thee trust a sword,
defend thy hearthstone first. Who else shall guard
thy babe Iulus, or thy reverend sire?
Or me, thy wife that was—what help have I?”
Vergil. Aeneid. Theodore C. Williams. trans. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Co. 1910.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.