As Bold as Storming Heaven
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Cometeram soberbos os Gigantes, Com guerra vã, o Olimpo claro e puro; Tentou Pirítoo e Teseu, de ignorantes, O Reino de Plutão horrendo e escuro. Se houve feitos no mundo tão possantes, Não menos é trabalho ilustre e duro, Quanto foi cometer Inferno o Céu, Que outrem cometa a fúria de Nereu.
The proud Giants attacked, with vain war, bright and pure Olympus; Pirithous and Theseus, in their ignorance, attempted the horrendous, dark Realm of Pluto. If there were in the world such mighty deeds — as much as it was for Hell to attack Heaven — no less illustrious and hard a labor is it that another should brave the fury of Nereus.
Near the close of Canto 2, the daring of the sea-voyage is measured against myth's great assaults on the divine: the Giants against Olympus, and Theseus and Pirithous against the underworld.
The stanza is a priamel: it stacks two myths of storming a forbidden realm — the Giants heaving mountains at Olympus, Pirithous and Theseus breaking into the underworld to steal Persephone — and uses them to weigh the daring of putting out onto the open sea. Nereus, the old sea-god, stands in for the ocean itself, so "to brave the fury of Nereus" turns the voyage into an assault on a god's own domain, a deed fit to sit beside the great transgressions of legend.
What is easy to miss is that every myth named here is a failure that ended in punishment. The Giants were crushed under the mountains they piled up; Pirithous was pinned forever in the chair of forgetfulness in Hades. Camões praises the sailors' boldness with images of hubris that went badly, so the compliment carries a shadow: to cross the sea is to trespass where mortals were not meant to go, and the reader is asked to feel the glory and the overreach at once.
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