154While the Sibyl was recounting such things along the steep path, Trojan Aeneas emerges from the Stygian abodes into the Euboean city, and, having offered sacrifices with favourable omens according to custom, he comes to the shores that did not yet bear his nurse's name. 158Here too, after the long weariness of his toils, Neritian Macareus had stopped, companion of much-tried Ulysses; 160he recognises Achaemenides, once abandoned amid the rocks of Etna, and, amazed to find him so unexpectedly alive: 'What chance or what god preserves you, Achaemenides? 163Why,' he says, 'does a foreign prow carry a Greek? 164What land is your ship seeking?' 165To these questions Achaemenides, no longer shaggy in his clothing, now his own man again, his covering no longer pinned together with thorns, replies: 'May I look again upon Polyphemus and those jaws dripping with human blood, if my home and the Ithacan's ship are dearer to me than this ship, if I revere Aeneas less than my father; nor shall I ever be able to be grateful enough, though I should give everything.
172That I speak and breathe and look up at the sky and the sun's stars, could I be ungrateful and undutiful? 174He granted that this life of mine did not pass into the Cyclops' mouth, and even if I were to leave the light of life now, I shall be buried in a tomb, or at least not in that belly. 177What was my state of mind then (unless fear took away all sense and mind) when, left behind, I saw you making for the open sea? 179I wanted to shout out, but I feared to betray myself to the enemy: even Ulysses' shouting nearly harmed your ship. 181I saw when he tore a huge crag from the mountain and sent it into the middle of the waves; 183I saw him again hurling vast rocks with his giant's arm, as if driven by the force of a catapult, and I was terrified that wave or wind would sink the ship, forgetting that I was no longer on it.
187But when flight had carried you away from certain death, he, groaning, prowls all over Etna and feels his way through the woods with his hand, and, robbed of his eye, stumbles against the rocks, and, stretching out his arms, fouled with gore, towards the sea, he curses the Achaean race and says: "O if some chance would bring Ulysses back to me, or one of his comrades, against whom my anger might rage, whose entrails I might eat, whose living limbs I might tear with my right hand, whose blood might flood my throat, and whose crushed limbs might quiver beneath my teeth: how slight, or none at all, would be the loss of my sight!"
198These things and more he cried in his savagery; 198a ghastly horror seizes me as I watch his face still dripping with slaughter, and his cruel hands and the empty socket of his eye, and his limbs and his beard matted with human blood. 202Death was before my eyes, yet that itself was the least of my pain: I thought that now he would seize me, now plunge my entrails into his own, and there clung in my mind the image of that time when I saw him dash the bodies of my comrades, two at a time, three and four times against the ground, while he himself, crouching over them like a shaggy lion, stowed in his greedy belly the entrails and the flesh and the bones with their white marrow, and the half-alive limbs.
210Trembling seized me: I stood bloodless and wretched; 211and seeing him chewing and spitting out the bloody feast from his mouth, and vomiting lumps clotted with wine, I imagined that such a fate was being prepared for wretched me; and for many days, lying hidden and trembling at every sound, fearing death and longing to die, keeping off hunger with acorns and grass mixed with leaves, alone, destitute, hopeless, left to death and punishment, after a long time I saw this ship far off, and begged for escape by gestures, and ran to the shore — and I moved them. 220A Trojan ship took in a Greek! 221You too, dearest of comrades, tell your own adventures and those of your leader and of the band that trusted itself to the sea with you.'