575The Dardanians receive the nervous boys with applause, and rejoice at the sight, and recognise the faces of their ancestors. 577After they had ridden happily round the whole gathering before the eyes of their families, Epytides from far off gave the signal with a shout to them as they stood ready and cracked his whip. 580They galloped apart in equal numbers, and in threes broke up their columns, dividing the bands, and, called back again, wheeled round and bore their weapons levelled. 583Then they enter other runs and other counter-runs, facing each other across the space, and interweave circles with alternate circles, and in arms call up mock images of battle; 586and now they bare their backs in flight, now turn their spears in hostility, now, peace made, ride along side by side.
588As once in lofty Crete, they say, the Labyrinth held a path woven between blind walls and a baffling deceit of a thousand ways, where the wandering, undetectable and irretraceable, would defeat the clues for following; 592in no other course do the sons of the Trojans entangle their tracks and weave flights and battles in play, like dolphins which, swimming through the wet seas, cut the Carpathian and Libyan waters. This custom of riding and these contests Ascanius first revived, when he was ringing Alba Longa with walls, and taught the early Latins to celebrate them, in the way he himself as a boy, in the way the Trojan youth with him had done; 600the Albans taught their own sons; 600from them in turn mighty Rome received it and preserved the ancestral rite; 602and now the boys are called Troy, the troop Trojan.
603So far were the games celebrated in honour of the holy father.