527When the envoys returned from here, reporting that Aetolian arms were refused them, the Rutulians wage the war they had prepared without those forces, and much blood is shed on both sides; 530see, Turnus carries greedy torches against the pine-built hulls, and the ships which the waves had spared fear fire. 532And now Mulciber was burning the pitch and wax and the other food of the flame, and was climbing the tall mast to the sails, and the thwarts of the curved ships were smoking: when the holy mother of the gods, remembering that these pines were felled on the peak of Ida, filled the air with the clashing of struck bronze and the drone of the blown boxwood pipe, and, borne through the light air by her tamed lions: 'In vain do you hurl fire with your sacrilegious hand, Turnus!' 540she said.
540'I shall snatch them away, nor, with my consent, shall devouring fire burn parts of my groves and limbs of mine.' 542As the goddess spoke it thundered, and after the thunder heavy rain-clouds fell with leaping hail, and the Astraean brothers throw into confusion the air and the swollen sea with sudden clashes, and go into battle. 546Using the force of one of them, the kindly mother broke the hempen cables of the Phrygian ships, and carries the ships headlong and sinks them beneath the sea; 549their timbers softening and the wood turned into bodies, the curved sterns change into the shapes of heads, the oars pass into fingers and swimming legs; what had been a side remains a side, and the keel set beneath the middle of the ships is changed to serve as a spine, the rigging becomes soft hair, the yardarms arms; their colour is sea-blue, as it had been; 555and the waves that they used to fear they now harry in girlish play as sea naiads, and, born on the hard mountains, they throng the soft sea, and their origin does not trouble them.
559Yet not forgetting how many dangers they had often endured on the sea, they often placed their hands beneath storm-tossed ships, unless one carried Achaeans: still remembering the Phrygian disaster, they hated the Pelasgians, and they looked on the wreckage of the Neritian ship with joyful faces, and with joyful faces saw the ship of Alcinous grow stiff and stone grow over the wood. 566There was hope that, with the fleet given life as sea nymphs, the Rutulian might desist from war through fear of the portent: he persists, and each side has gods, and, what is as good as gods, they have courage; 569and no longer do they seek a dowry realm, nor the sceptre of a father-in-law, nor you, maiden Lavinia, but victory, and they wage war from shame at laying it down; and at last Venus sees her son's arms victorious, and Turnus falls, Ardea falls, called powerful while Turnus lived.
574After the barbarian sword had destroyed it and its houses lay hidden in warm ash, from the middle of the heap a bird, then first known, flies up and beats the ashes with flapping wings. 578Its sound, its leanness, its pallor, and everything that befits a captured city, even the city's name, remained in it; 580and Ardea herself is mourned by her own wings.