eaks
forth thus in deep accents:

'Copious indeed, Drances, and fluent is ever thy speech at the moment
war calls for action; and when the fathers are summoned thou art there
the first. But we need no words to fill our senate-house, safely as thou
wingest them while the mounded walls keep off the enemy, and the
trenches swim not yet with blood. Thunder on in rhetoric, thy wonted
way: accuse thou me of fear, Drances, since thine hand hath heaped so
many Teucrians in slaughter, and thy glorious trophies dot the fields.
Trial is open of what live valour can do; nor indeed is our foe far to
seek; on all sides they surround our walls. Are we going to meet them?
Why linger? Will thy bravery ever be in that windy tongue and those
timorous feet of thine? . . . _My conqueror?_ Shall any justly flout me
as conquered, who sees Tiber swoln fuller with Ilian blood, and all the
house and people of Evander laid low, and the Arcadians stripped of
their armour? Not such did Bitias and huge Pandarus prove me, and the
thousand men whom on one day my conquering hand sent down to hell, shut
as I was in their walls and closed in the enemy's ramparts. _In war is
no safety._ Fool! be thy boding on the Dardanian's head and thine own
fortunes. Go on; cease not to throw all into confusion with thy terrors,
to exalt the strength of a twice vanquished race, and abase the arms of
Latinus before it. Now the princes of the Myrmidons tremble before
Phrygian arms, now Tydeus' son and Achilles of Larissa, and Aufidus
river recoils from the Adriatic wave. Or when the scheming villain
[407-443]pretends to shrink at my abuse, and sharpens calumny by
terror! never shall this hand--keep quiet!--rob thee of such a soul;
with thee let it abide, and dwell in that breast of thine. Now I return
to thee, my lord, and thy weighty resolves. If thou dost repose no
further hope in our arms, if all hath indeed left us, and one repulse
been our utter ruin, and our fortune is beyond recovery, let us plead
for peace and stretch forth unarmed hands. Yet ah! had we aught of our
wonted manhood, his toil beyond all other is blessed and his spirit
eminent, who rather than see it thus, hath fallen prone in death and
once bitten the ground. But if we have yet resources and an army still
unbroken, and cities and peoples of Italy remain for our aid; but if
even the Trojans have won their glory at great cost of blood (they too
have their deaths, and the storm fell equally on all), w