Venus as Paris Saw Her
Read the full text in our reader
E por mais namorar o soberano Padre, de quem foi sempre amada e cara, Se lhe apresenta assim como ao Troiano, Na selva Idea, já se apresentara. Se a vira o caçador, que o vulto humano Perdeu, vendo Diana na água clara, Nunca os famintos galgos o mataram, Que primeiro desejos o acabaram.
And to enchant still more the sovereign Father, by whom she was ever loved and dear, she presents herself just as she once had appeared to the Trojan in the Idaean wood. Had the hunter seen her so — the hunter who lost his human form when he saw Diana in the clear water — never would his famished greyhounds have killed him, for desire would have finished him off first.
Venus prepares to plead with Jupiter for the Portuguese and makes herself irresistibly beautiful. The narrator gauges that beauty by two myths: the goddess as she once appeared to Paris on Mount Ida, and the hunter Actaeon destroyed for a lesser glimpse.
Venus tunes her beauty to a purpose: she is about to argue for the Portuguese before Jupiter, and she arms herself with the face that once won the judgment of Paris on Mount Ida. Camões measures that face against a second myth. Actaeon caught only a glimpse of chaste Diana bathing, was turned into a stag, and was torn apart by his own hounds. Set beside Venus, the narrator says, those hounds would never have gotten the chance: desire alone would have killed the man first.
What a first reader can miss is how coldly the compliment is built. The stanza runs on two deaths that never happen — the counterfactual "had he seen her" and "never would they have killed him." Camões borrows Ovid's Actaeon (Metamorphoses 3) not to warn against looking, but to price Venus's beauty in lives: Diana's gaze punishes with hounds, Venus's would punish faster, with wanting itself. The seduction of Jupiter that follows is thus staged as a weapon before it is a plea.
Read the full commentary — and tap any word for its dictionary entry — in the interlinear reader.
Open Os Lusíadas 2.35 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 2.35 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/2.35/