P. Vergilius Maro, Aeneid
Theodore C. Williams, Ed.

Aeneas straightway from his lofty ships
lets down his troop by bridges. Some await
the ebbing of slack seas, and boldly leap
into the shallows; others ply the oar.
Tarchon a beach discovers, where the sands
sing not, nor waves with broken murmur fall,
but full and silent swells the gentle sea.
Steering in haste that way, he called his crews:
“Now bend to your stout oars, my chosen brave.
Lift each ship forward, till her beak shall cleave
yon hostile shore; and let her keel's full weight
the furrow drive. I care not if we break
our ship's side in so sure an anchorage,
if once we land.” While Tarchon urged them thus,
the crews bent all together to their blades
and sped their foaming barks to Latium's plain,
till each beak gripped the sand and every keel
lay on dry land unscathed:—all save thine own,
O Tarchon! dashed upon a sand-bar, she!
Long poised upon the cruel ridge she hung,
tilted this way or that and beat the waves,
then split, and emptied forth upon the tide
her warriors; and now the drifting wreck
of shattered oars and thwarts entangles them,
or ebb of swirling waters sucks them down.