Some wound the gate, some ring against the wall;

Some weak, or ponderous with the brazen head,

Drop harmless on the pavement, sounding dead.


Then bold Amphimedon his javelin cast:

Thy hand, Telemachus, it lightly razed:

And from Ctesippus’ arm the spear elanced:

On good Eumaeus’ shield and shoulder glanced;

Not lessened of their force (so light the wound)

Each sung along and dropped upon the ground.

Fate doom’d thee next, Eurydamus, to bear,

Thy death ennobled by Ulysses’ spear.

By the bold son Amphimedon was slain,

And Polybus renown’d, the faithful swain.

Pierced through the breast the rude Ctesippus bled,

And thus Philaetius gloried o’er the dead:


“There end thy pompous vaunts and high disdain;

O sharp in scandal, voluble and vain!

How weak is mortal pride! To Heaven alone

The event of actions and our fates are known:

Scoffer, behold what gratitude we bear:

The victim’s heel is answered with this spear.”


Ulysses brandish’d high his vengeful steel,

And Damastorides that instant fell:

Fast by Leocritus expiring lay,

The prince’s javelin tore its bloody way

Through all his bowels: down he tumbled prone,

His batter’d front and brains besmear the stone.


Now Pallas shines confess’d; aloft she spreads

The arm of vengeance o’er their guilty heads:

The dreadful aegis blazes in their eye:

Amazed they see, they tremble, and they fly:

Confused, distracted, through the rooms they fling:

Like oxen madden’d by the breeze’s sting,

When sultry days, and long, succeed the gentle spring,

Not half so keen fierce vultures of the chase

Stoop from the mountains on the feather’d race,

When, the wide field extended snares beset,

With conscious dread they shun the quivering net:

No help, no flight; but wounded every way,

Headlong they drop; the fowlers seize their prey.

On all sides thus they double wound on wound,

In prostrate heaps the wretches beat the ground,