cane, Some mighty fish draws panting to the shore: Not with less ease the barbed javelin bore The gaping dastard; as the spear was shook, He fell, and life his heartless breast forsook. Next on Eryalus he flies; a stone, Large as a rock, was by his fury thrown: Full on his crown the ponderous fragment flew, And burst the helm, and cleft the head in two: Prone to the ground the breathless warrior fell, And death involved him with the shades of hell. Then low in dust Epaltes, Echius, lie; Ipheas, Evippus, Polymelus, die; Amphoterus and Erymas succeed; And last Tlepolemus and Pyres bleed. Where'er he moves, the growing slaughters spread In heaps on heaps a monument of dead. When now Sarpedon his brave friends beheld Grovelling in dust, and gasping on the field, With this reproach his flying host he warms: "Oh stain to honour! oh disgrace to arms! Forsake, inglorious, the contended plain; This hand unaided shall the war sustain: The task be mine this hero's strength to try, Who mows whole troops, and makes an army fly." He spake: and, speaking, leaps from off the car: Patroclus lights, and sternly waits the war. As when two vultures on the mountain's height Stoop with resounding pinions to the fight; They cuff, they tear, they raise a screaming cry; The desert echoes, and the rocks reply: The warriors thus opposed in arms, engage With equal clamours, and with equal rage. Jove view'd the combat: whose event foreseen, He thus bespoke his sister and his queen: "The hour draws on; the destinies ordain,(245) My godlike son shall press the Phrygian plain: Already on the verge of death he stands, His life is owed to fierce Patroclus' hands, What passions in a parent's breast debate! Say, shall I snatch him from impending fate, And send him safe to Lycia, distant far From all the dangers and the toils of war; Or to his doom my bravest offspring yield, And fatten, with celestial blood, t