A Catalogue of Punished Sin
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Do pecado tiveram sempre a pena Muitos, que Deus o quis, e permitiu: Os que foram roubar a bela Helena, E com Apio também Tarquilio o viu. Pois por quem David Santo se condena? Ou quem o Tribo ilustre destruiu De Benjamim? Bem claro no-lo ensina Por Sara Faraó, Siquém por Dina.
Many always suffered the punishment for their sin, for God willed and permitted it: those who went to carry off the beautiful Helen, and Tarquin too saw it, along with Appius. For what is holy David condemned? Or who destroyed the illustrious tribe of Benjamin? Pharaoh teaches it to us plainly through Sarah, and Shechem through Dinah.
In a moral digression, the poet argues that lust and violation have always drawn God's punishment, running through a roll-call of offenders drawn from Greek myth, Roman legend, and the Hebrew Bible.
The stanza is a roll-call of sexual crimes punished by God, each story crushed down to a single name the reader is expected to unpack. Paris and Helen bring down Troy; Appius Claudius and Sextus Tarquin fall for lusting after Virginia and Lucretia; David is condemned over Bathsheba; the tribe of Benjamin is nearly wiped out after the rape at Gibeah; Pharaoh is struck for taking Sarah, and Shechem for violating Dinah. The point of the pile-up is the opening claim: from sin the punishment always came, because God willed it.
What a first reader misses is how the list mixes pagan legend and Hebrew scripture without a seam — Helen sits beside David, Tarquin beside Pharaoh — as if Greek myth, Roman history, and the Bible were one continuous record of the same divine justice. That fusion is the Renaissance habit of reading all history as a single moral book, and here it does quiet work: no rank exempts anyone, and the crimes of kings are named alongside the rest.
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