Argive

"Then, but for folly or Fate's adverse power, / his word had made us with our trusty glaive / lay bare the Argive ambush, and this hour / should Ilion stand, and thou, O Priam's lofty tower!"

"Then he, at length his show of fear laid by, / 'Great King, all truly will I own, whate'er / the issue, nor my Argive race deny. / This first; if fortune, spiteful and unfair, / hath made poor Sinon wretched, fortune ne'er / shall make me false or faithless.'"

"In doubt, we bade Eurypylus explore / Apollo's oracle, and back he brought / the dismal news: With blood, a maiden's gore, / ye stilled the winds, when Trojan shores ye sought. / With blood again must your return be bought; / an Argive victim doth the God demand."

Meanwhile from neighbouring Tenedos once more, / beneath the tranquil moonbeam's friendly care, / with ordered ships, along the deep sea-floor, / back came the Argive host, and sought the well-known shore. / Forth from the royal galley sprang the flame, / when Sinon, screened by partial Fate, withdrew / the bolts and barriers of the pinewood frame, / and from its inmost caverns, bared to view, / the fatal horse disgorged the Danaan crew.

Here first with missiles, from a temple's height / hurled by our comrades, we are crushed and slain, / and piteous is the slaughter, at the sight / of Argive helms for Argive foes mista'en.

Saved beyond hope and glad the land is won, / and lustral rites, with blazing altars, pay / to Jove, and make the shores of Actium gay / with Ilian games, as, like our sires, we strip / and oil our sinews for the wrestler's play. / Proud, thus escaping from the foemen's grip, / past all the Argive towns, through swarming Greeks, to slip.

[…] And many an old philosophy ⁠On Argive heights divinely sang, ⁠And round us all the thicket rang To many a flute of Arcady.

The Greeks generally think that this fate came upon him because he induced the Pythoness to pronounce against Demaratus; the Athenians differ from all others in saying that it was because he cut down the sacred grove of the goddesses when he made his invasion by Eleusis; while the Argives ascribe it to his having taken from their refuge and cut to pieces certain argives who had fled from battle into a precinct sacred to Argus, where Cleomenes slew them, burning likewise at the same time, through irreverence, the grove itself.