who awaits thee. Nor did Cisseus'
daughter alone conceive a firebrand and travail of bridal flames. Nay,
even such a birth hath Venus of her own, a second Paris, another
balefire for Troy towers reborn.'

These words uttered, she descends to earth in all her terrors, and calls
dolorous Allecto from the home of the Fatal Sisters in nether gloom,
whose delight is in woeful wars, in wrath and treachery and evil feuds:
hateful to [327-360]lord Pluto himself, hateful and horrible to her
hell-born sisters; into so many faces does she turn, so savage the guise
of each, so thick and black bristles she with vipers. And her Juno spurs
on with words, saying thus:

'Grant me, virgin born of Night, this thy proper task and service, that
the rumour of our renown may not crumble away, nor the Aeneadae have
power to win Latinus by marriage or beset the borders of Italy. Thou
canst set brothers once united in armed conflict, and overturn families
with hatreds; thou canst launch into houses thy whips and deadly brands;
thine are a thousand names, a thousand devices of injury. Stir up thy
teeming breast, sunder the peace they have joined, and sow seeds of
quarrel; let all at once desire and demand and seize on arms.'

Thereon Allecto, steeped in Gorgonian venom, first seeks Latium and the
high house of the Laurentine monarch, and silently sits down before
Amata's doors, whom a woman's distress and anger heated to frenzy over
the Teucrians' coming and the marriage of Turnus. At her the goddess
flings a snake out of her dusky tresses, and slips it into her bosom to
her very inmost heart, that she may embroil all her house under its
maddening magic. Sliding between her raiment and smooth breasts, it
coils without touch, and instils its viperous breath unseen; the great
serpent turns into the twisted gold about her neck, turns into the long
ribbon of her chaplet, inweaves her hair, and winds slippery over her
body. And while the gliding infection of the clammy poison begins to
penetrate her sense and run in fire through her frame, nor as yet hath
all her breast caught fire, softly she spoke and in mothers' wonted
wise, with many a tear over her daughter and the Phrygian bridal:

'Is it to exiles, to Teucrians, that Lavinia is proffered in marriage, O
father? and hast thou no compassion on [361-392]thy daughter and on
thyself? no compassion on her mother, whom with the first northern wind
the treacherous rover will abandon, steering to sea