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Dulichium, Samè, Neritos,
Whose rocky sides the waves emboss;
The crags of Ithaca we flee,
Laertes' rugged sovereignty;
Nor in our flight forget to curse
The land that was Ulysses' nurse."
They landed on the coast of Leucadia, at Actium—the scene, be it remembered, of Augustus's great naval victory over Antony and Cleopatra. Here, the Trojan chief takes care to say, he refreshed his weary crew with rest, and celebrated national games. Nay, he hung up there, fugitive as he was, a trophy of defiance—a shield which he had taken from a Greek hero, and inscribed upon it, "The spoil of Æneas from the conquering Argives." So speaks the poet; his Roman audience would recognise the Actian games, celebrated there every fifth year by order of Augustus in honour of his great victory; and Æneas's trophy is not so out of place as it might seem.
At Buthrotus, in Epirus, the wanderers had met with old friends. Andromache is settled there, now the wife of Helenus, who, by a strange vicissitude, has become the successor of Neoptolemus in his Greek province. There is little of what we call sentiment in these "heroic" times, especially as concerns "woman and her master." It grates upon the feelings of the reader who has in mind the pathetic scene between Hector and his wife in the Iliad of Homer, to be told here by the poet—told, too, as an ordinary incident, as in fact it was—that Andromache had become the property of the conqueror Neoptolemus, and that he,