The Lion of Ceuta
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Rompem-se aqui dos nossos os primeiros, Tantos dos inimigos a eles vão! Está ali Nuno, qual pelos outeiros De Ceita está o fortíssimo leão, Que cercado se vê dos cavaleiros Que os campos vão correr de Tetuão: Perseguem-no com as lanças, e ele iroso, Torvado um pouco está, mas não medroso.
Here our foremost ranks are broken through, so many of the enemy come at them! There stands Nuno, like the mighty lion on the hills of Ceuta that finds itself ringed by the horsemen who go raiding the fields of Tetouan: they harry it with lances, and it, enraged, is checked a little, but not afraid.
In Canto 4 the Portuguese line breaks at Aljubarrota and Nuno Álvares Pereira holds the collapse alone. Camões stops the battle to compare him to a lion ringed by Moorish horsemen outside Ceuta.
The Portuguese line has actually broken. Camões says so plainly in the first line, and then spends the other seven lines on a lion. That is the whole move: the moment the narrative would have to report a defeat, it converts the defeat into an image, and the image holds instead of the line.
The simile is Homer's and Virgil's stock cornered lion, but Camões moves it to a real place. Ceuta and Tetouan are in Morocco, across from Gibraltar, and Ceuta had been Portuguese since 1415 — the first overseas conquest, the thing that started everything the poem is about. So the comparison for a Portuguese hero surrounded by Castilians is drawn from Portuguese soldiers surrounding a lion in Africa. What holds Nuno up is the empire the poem hasn't reached yet.
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