The fury of the mob
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" Alteradas então do Reino as gentes Co'o ódio, que ocupado os peitos tinha, Absolutas cruezas e evidentes Faz do povo o furor por onde vinha; Matando vão amigos e parentes Do adúltero Conde e da Rainha, Com quem sua incontinência desonesta Mais ( depois de viúva) manifesta.
Then the people of the kingdom, stirred by the hatred that had gripped their hearts, commit unrestrained and open cruelties: the fury of the mob does its work wherever it passes. They go killing the friends and kinsmen of the adulterous Count and of the Queen — with whom, now that she is a widow, she makes her shameless incontinence all the more plain.
Lisbon, December 1383. The Count has just been killed inside the palace; now the city turns on everyone connected to him and to the Queen. Camões gives the riot a single stanza.
The stanza is the riot itself. The Count is already dead; this is what follows, when a crowd that has one grievance goes looking for anyone attached to it. Camões names no victim, only categories — friends, kinsmen — because that is how the killing selected: by association, not by act.
What a first reader misses is who the grammar makes responsible. The subject of "Faz" is not the people but "o furor" — the fury of the people. The mob does not commit the cruelties; its rage does, and the people are grammatically the place the rage came from. That dodge matters: this street violence is the opening of the House of Aviz, the dynasty whose glory the whole poem exists to sing. Camões will not call it the nation's doing, and he will not leave it out either.
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