1 There are other maidens unwedded in Latium and Laurentine fields, and of no mean birth.
2 Those seeds have fiery force and divine birth, so far as they are not clogged by taint of the body and dulled by earthy frames and limbs ready to die.
3 Here the full space of thrice an hundred years shall the kingdom endure under the race of Hector's kin, till the royal priestess Ilia from Mars' embrace shall give birth to a twin progeny.
4 Twin monsters there are, called the Dirae by their name, whom with infernal Megaera the dead of night bore at one single birth, and wreathed them in like serpent coils, and clothed them in windy wings.
5 Likewise she had sprinkled pretended waters of Avernus' spring, and rank herbs are sought mown by moonlight with brazen sickles, dark with milky venom, and sought is the talisman torn from a horse's forehead at birth ere the dam could snatch it.
6 Then the son of Saturn, compeller of the ocean deep, uttered thus: 'It is wholly right, O Cytherean, that thy trust should be in my realm, whence thou drawest birth; and I have deserved it: often have I allayed the rage and full fury of sky and sea.'
7 Likewise had he fashioned the she-wolf couched after the birth in the green cave of Mars; round her teats the twin boys hung playing, and fearlessly mouthed their foster-mother; she, with round neck bent back, stroked them by turns and shaped their bodies with her tongue.
8 Third Asilas, interpreter between men and gods, master of the entrails of beasts and the stars in heaven, of speech of birds and ominous lightning flashes, draws a thousand men after him in serried lines bristling with spears, bidden to his command from Pisa city, of Alphaean birth on Etruscan soil.
9 And no more said, his eyes light on a vast stone, a stone ancient and vast that haply lay upon the plain, set for a landmark to divide contested fields: scarcely might twelve chosen men lift it on their shoulders, of such frame as now earth brings to birth: then the hero caught it up with trembling hand and whirled it at the foe, rising higher and quickening his speed.