|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
 |
||||
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
|
|
||||
|
Sling weighty stones, when from afar they fight; Their casques are cork, a covering thick and light. Next these in rank, the warlike Ufens went, And led the mountain troops that Nursia sent. The rude Equicolae his rule obey'd; Hunting their sport, and plund'ring was their trade. In arms they plow'd, to battle still prepar'd: Their soil was barren, and their hearts were hard. Umbro the priest the proud Marrubians led, By King Archippus sent to Turnus' aid, And peaceful olives crown'd his hoary head. His wand and holy words, the viper's rage, And venom'd wounds of serpents could assuage. He, when he pleas'd with powerful juice to steep Their temples, shut their eyes in pleasing sleep. But vain were Marsian herbs, and magic art, To cure the wound giv'n by the Dardan dart: Yet his untimely fate th' Angitian woods In sighs remurmur'd to the Fucine floods. The son of fam'd Hippolytus was there, Fam'd as his sire, and, as his mother, fair; Whom in Egerian groves Aricia bore, And nurs'd his youth along the marshy shore, Where great Diana's peaceful altars flame, In fruitful fields; and Virbius was his name. Hippolytus, as old records have said, Was by his stepdam sought to share her bed; But, when no female arts his mind could move, She turn'd to furious hate her impious love. Torn by wild horses on the sandy shore, Another's crimes th' unhappy hunter bore, Glutting his father's eyes with guiltless gore. But chaste Diana, who his death deplor'd, With Aesculapian herbs his life restor'd. Then Jove, who saw from high, with just disdain, The dead inspir'd with vital breath again, Struck to the center, with his flaming dart, Th' unhappy founder of the godlike art. But Trivia kept in secret shades alone Her care, Hippolytus, to fate unknown; And call'd him Virbius in th' Egerian grove, Where then he liv'd obscure, but safe from Jove. |
