135And now the ships had been drawn up on the dry shore; 136the young men were busy with marriages and new fields; 137I was giving laws and homes: when suddenly, from a tainted tract of sky, there came upon our limbs a wasting, pitiable plague, and upon trees and crops, and a season bringing death. 140Men were giving up their sweet lives or dragging their sick bodies; 141then Sirius scorched the fields barren; 142the grass withered, and the diseased crop denied us food. 143My father urges us to cross the sea again and go back to the oracle of Ortygia and to Phoebus, and to beg his favour: what end would he grant to our weary fortunes; 145where would he bid us seek help for our troubles; 146where should we turn our course.
Lectitō › Vergil › Aeneid, Book 3
Vergil · Aeneid III
Aeneid 3.135–146
Plague strikes the Cretan settlement
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Vergil, Aeneid III. Latin text: J. B. Greenough, The Bucolics, Aeneid, and Georgics of Virgil (Boston, 1881), public domain; digital text from the Perseus Digital Library, CC BY-SA. Word analysis: drafted by our own tagger (trained on the hand-checked texts on this site), with every doubtful word checked by hand. English translation and section titles: written for this app, each checked against the Latin by a second reader.