Mercy Even in Beasts
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Se já nas brutas feras, cuja mente Natura fez cruel de nascimento, E nas aves agrestes, que somente Nas rapinas aéreas têm o intento, Com pequenas crianças viu a gente Terem tão piedoso sentimento, Como coa mãe de Nino já mostraram, E co'os irmãos que Roma edificaram;
If even in the brute beasts, whose mind Nature made cruel from birth, and in the wild birds, which set their intent on nothing but aerial plunder, people have seen so merciful a feeling toward little children, as those beasts once showed to the mother of Ninus, and to the brothers who founded Rome;
Still in Nuno Álvares Pereira's oration rallying Portugal against Castile. He builds a long conditional: if even wild animals show tenderness to human children, how much more should Portuguese men defend their homeland. This stanza opens that argument; it completes only in the next.
Nuno Álvares Pereira is mid-speech, whipping up the Portuguese to fight Castile, and he reaches for an argument from nature: if even predators soften toward human infants, men should certainly rise for their homeland. The whole stanza is one suspended "if" clause; the payoff lands only in the next stanza, so it reads as a held breath.
The force is in the two examples, both nursed by beasts. "The mother of Nino" points to Semiramis, the Assyrian queen said to have been fed by doves as an abandoned baby; "the brothers who founded Rome" are Romulus and Remus, suckled by the she-wolf. Camões is quietly setting Portugal's cause beside the founding legends of Assyria and Rome, so the coming call to arms carries the weight of empire-founding, not just a border skirmish.
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