Send Mercury Ahead
Read the full text in our reader
E tu, Padre de grande fortaleza, Da determinação, que tens tomada, Não tornes por detrás, pois é fraqueza Desistir-se da cousa começada. Mercúrio, pois excede em ligeireza Ao vento leve, e à seta bem talhada, Lhe vá mostrar a terra, onde se informe Da índia, e onde a gente se reforme.
And you, Father of great strength, do not turn back from the resolve you have taken, for it is weakness to give up on a thing once begun. Mercury, since he surpasses in swiftness the light wind and the well-fashioned arrow, let him go show them the land, where they may inform themselves about India, and where our men may recover.
Venus keeps pressing her case to Jupiter, urging him not to abandon his settled plan for the Portuguese, and to dispatch swift Mercury to show Gama's fleet the way to India.
Venus is still working on Jupiter. She frames retreat as beneath him: a god of "great strength" who abandons a settled plan would be showing not mercy but fraqueza, weakness. Then she supplies the practical fix she wants approved, sending Mercury, the messenger, to point Gama's fleet toward India and toward a coast where the exhausted crew can take on supplies and rest.
The move a first reader misses is how much of this is flattery aimed at a single word. Venus does not argue that the plan is good; she argues that quitting is shameful, boxing Jupiter into agreeing by making persistence a matter of his honor. The swiftness of Mercury, faster than wind or arrow, is Homeric machinery, but the real speed here is rhetorical: she has already decided the outcome and is only steering the king of the gods into ratifying it.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 1.40 in the full reader
Always open passages in the reader
You are reading a page of the Os Lusíadas — the whole book is free in our interlinear reader.
The Great Library Project presses the classics in their original languages, glossed word by word — free to read, always. Browse the whole library.
Also on our shelves:
Os Lusíadas 1.40 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/1.40/