1 Return me to the Greeks; let me revisit and renew the fight.
2 This side and that strive to hurl back the enemy, and fight hard on the very edge of Ausonia.
3 Nor do the bold Rutulians care longer to continue the blind fight, but strive to clear the rampart with missiles.
4 These carry for war javelins and grim stabbing weapons, and fight with the round shaft and sharp point of the Sabellian pike.
5 The springs of war are aflow: they fight with arms in their grasp, the arms that chance first supplied, that fresh blood stains.
6 The youth broke forward and plunged into the fight; and even as Aeneas' hand rose to bring down the blow, he caught up his point and held him in delay.
7 Madly I seize my arms, nor is there so much purpose in arms; but my spirit is on fire to gather a band for fighting and charge for the citadel with my comrades.
8 So Tarchon gallops amid the slaughter where his squadrons retreat, and urges his troops in changing tones, calling man on man by name, and rallies the fliers to fight.
9 Polished maces are their weapons, and these it is their wont to fit with a tough thong; a target covers their left side, and for close fighting they have crooked swords.
10 If he will fight out the war and expel the Teucrians, it had been well to meet me here in arms; so had he lived to whom life were granted of heaven or his own right hand.
11 Already they see the sky a mass of dust, the cavalry approaching, and shafts falling thickly amid the camp; the dismal cry uprises of warriors fighting and falling under the War-god's heavy hand.
12 Here indeed the battle is fiercest, as if all the rest of the fighting were nowhere, and no slaughter but here throughout the city, so do we descry the war in full fury, the Grecians rushing on the building, and their shielded column driving up against the beleaguered threshold.
13 Thus madly he runs on: sparkles leap out from all his blazing face, and his keen eyes flash fire: even as the bull when before his first fight he bellows awfully, and drives against a tree's trunk to make trial of his angry horns, and buffets the air with blows or scatters the sand in prelude of battle.
14 Here is the band of them who bore wounds in fighting for their country, and they who were pure in priesthood while life endured, and the good poets whose speech abased not Apollo; and they who made life beautiful by the arts of their invention, and who won by service a memory among men, the brows of all girt with the snow-white fillet.
15 Further, there stood arow in the entry images of the forefathers of old in ancient cedar, Italus, and lord Sabinus, planter of the vine, still holding in show the curved pruning-hook, and gray Saturn, and the likeness of Janus the double-facing, and the rest of their primal kings, and they who had borne wounds of war in fighting for their country.