On Venulus’ return, when Turnus learned
that Diomedes would not help their cause,
even without those added forces he
and his Rutulians did not relent;
and on both warring sides much blood was shed.
With avid torches, Turnus struck against
the Trojans’ pine-framed ships: the waves had spared
those hulls, but now they faced a flaming threat—
a fire that fed on resin, fed on pitch,
and any other thing that nourished it;
it even climbed the towering masts, attacked
the sails; and from the curving hull’s cross-planks,
smoke rose. But then Cybele called to mind
that all this timber came from her own pines;
and so the sacred Mother of the gods,
with brazen cymbals, clanging loud and harsh,
and with her brash and blatant boxwood flutes,
filled all the sky; drawn through the light air by
her team of harnessed lions, she outcried:
“O Turnus, with your sacrilegious hands
Latin [517–39]
you fling—in vain—those torches! I shall save
these ships; I’ll not permit the greedy flames
to burn these pines—these parts, these very limbs—
of my own forests.”
As the goddess spoke,
the thunder roared, its boom announced a downpour
of rain and leaping hail: the brother winds—
Astraeus’ sons—assailed the sky and burst
upon the waves and warred among themselves.
A gust from one of those three winds now helped
the nurturing Mother goddess; and she snapped
the hempen hawsers that had held hard fast
the Phrygian fleet; the ships were free; Cybele
now tilted them head down—into the sea.
The wood at once grew soft, turned into flesh;
the curving prows were transformed into heads;
the oars were changed to toes and swimming legs;
the flanking timbers, into living sides;
the keels, which line the ships midway, were spines;
the robes became soft hair; the sailyards changed
to arms. The color of the ships remained:
transformed to Naiads, they are’s till sea-green.
Those ships were born on rugged mountaintops;
but now, as water-nymphs, with young girls’ joy
they sport among the waves they used to fear;
but in soft waters, none among title throng
of nymphs bears traces of her origins.
And yet, recalling perils undergone
in savage storms at sea, they often help,
with their supporting hands, all ships at risk
of sinking—that is, all but Grecian ships.
In fact, remembering the ruin wrought
at Troy, they hate the Greeks; and they were glad
to see Ulysses’ ship with shattered planks,
and see the vessel of Alcinous
grow stiff as all its timbers turned to stone.
Latin [539–65]