Pedro's Revenge
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Não correu muito tempo que a vingança Não visse Pedro das mortais feridas, Que, em tomando do Reino a governança, A tomou dos fugidos homicidas. Do outro Pedro cruíssimo os alcança, Que ambos, imigos das humanas vidas, O concerto fizeram, duro e injusto, Que com Lépido e António fez Augusto.
Not much time passed before Pedro saw vengeance for the mortal wounds, for, on taking the governance of the Kingdom, he took it from the fugitive murderers. The other, cruelest Pedro reaches them, both being enemies of human lives, and they made the pact, hard and unjust, that Augustus made with Lepidus and Antony.
Camões closes the Inês de Castro story: once crowned, King Pedro I hunts down her fugitive killers and trades them with Pedro the Cruel of Castile, a bargain the poet likens to Rome's proscriptions.
The stanza closes the Inês de Castro episode. Once Pedro I inherits the throne, the killers who had fled to Castile are run down: the Portuguese king and Pedro the Cruel of Castile swap their fugitives, each handing over the men the other wants dead. Camões keeps the grammar as clipped as the deal itself.
What a first reader misses is that Camões does not celebrate the revenge. He calls both kings "enemies of human lives" and the exchange "hard and unjust," then compares it to the proscriptions of the Second Triumvirate, where Augustus, Lepidus, and Antony traded away the names of friends and relatives to be executed. The Roman parallel is an accusation, not a compliment: this is Rome's bloodiest bargain, not its glory.
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