1 Their very foe would extol the Teucrians with highest praises, and boasted himself a branch of the ancient Teucrian stem.
2 The foe holds our walls; from her high ridges Troy is toppling down.
3 I descend, and under a god's guidance clear my way between foe and flame; weapons give ground before me, and flames retire.
4 Mine own hand shall find me death: the foe will be merciful and seek my spoils: light is the loss of a tomb.
5 My comrades strip, and, slippery with oil, exercise their ancestral contests; glad to have got past so many Argive towns, and held on their flight through the encircling foe.
6 So, though shame and wrath beckon them on to battle, they yet bar the gates and do his bidding, and await the foe armed and in shelter of the towers.
7 News is brought to Turnus the captain, as he rages afar among the routed foe, that the enemy surges forth into fresh slaughter and flings wide his gates.
8 But rage and mad thirst of slaughter drive him like fire on the foe.
9 At last, hearing of the slaughter of their men, the Teucrian captains, Mnestheus and gallant Serestus, come up, and see their comrades in disordered flight and the foe let in.
10 No gods are they who bear us down; mortals, we feel the pressure of a mortal foe; we have as many lives and hands as he.
11 So speaks he, and bursts amid the serried foe.
12 Yet that they should meet face to face the sovereign of high Olympus allowed not; an early fate awaits them beneath a mightier foe.
13 But not in words does the Trojan hero frame his reply: for he hurls his javelin at the foe.
14 But in front of the battle-ranks the phantom dances rejoicingly, and with arms and mocking accents provokes the foe.
15 The Tyrrhene ranks gather round him, and all at once in unison shower their darts down on the hated foe.