The Poems of Virgil Author:Virgil Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of wrong, lengthy the windings of its course; but I will pass rapidly from point to point. Her husband was Sychseus, wealthiest of Phrenician landowners, and lov... more »ed by his poor wife with fervid passion; on him her father had bestowed her in her maiden bloom, linking them together by the omens of a first bridal. But the crown of Tyre was ou the head of her brother, Pygmalion, in crime monstrous beyond the rest of men. They were two, and fury came between them. Impious that he was, at the very altar of the palace, the love of gold blinding his eyes, he surprises Sychseus with his stealthy steel, and lays him low, without a thought for his sister's passion; he kept the deed long concealed, and with many a base coinage sustained the mockery of false hope in her pining love-lorn heart. But lo ! in her sleep there came to her no less than the semblance of her unburied spouse, lifting up a face of strange unearthly pallor; the ruthless altar and his breast gored with the steel, he laid bare the one and the other, and unveiled from first to last the dark domestic crime. Then he urges her to speed her flight, and quit her home for ever, and in aid of her journey unseals a hoard of treasure long hid in the earth, a mass of silver and gold which none else knew. Dido's soul was stirred; she began to make ready her flight, and friends to share it. There they meet, all whose hate of the tyrant was fell or whose fear was bitter; ships, that chanced to lie ready in the harbour, they seize, and freight with gold. Away it floats over the deep, the greedy Pygmalion's wealth; and who heads the enterprise ? a woman! So they came to the spot where you now see yonder those lofty walls, and the rising citadel of Carthage the new; there they bought ground, which got from the transaction the name of Byrsa, ...« less