The Captain with the Smooth Brow
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Estava um grande exército que pisa A terra Oriental, que o Idaspe lava; Rege-o um capitão de fronte lisa, Que com frondentes tirsos pelejava; Por ele edificada estava Nisa Nas ribeiras do rio, que manava, Tão próprio, que se ali estiver Semele, Dirá, por certo, que é seu filho aquele.
There stood a great army treading the Eastern land that the Hydaspes washes; it is led by a captain with a smooth, beardless brow, who fought with leafy thyrsi. By him Nysa had been built on the banks of the river that flowed there — the likeness so true that if Semele were standing there, she would say for certain that he was her son.
Paulo da Gama explains the figures embroidered on the Portuguese banners to the Catual of Calicut. Here the flag shows an army in the East led by a beardless commander fighting with vine-wreathed staffs.
Paulo da Gama is walking the Catual of Calicut along the painted banners, naming figure after figure. This one is Bacchus: the beardless face, the thyrsus (a staff wrapped in vine and ivy), the city of Nysa on the Hydaspes in India, all standard marks of the god's eastern conquest. The stanza reads as one more entry in a catalogue of ancient conquerors who reached the East.
What a first reader misses is who is looking. Bacchus has spent the whole poem trying to destroy Gama's fleet, precisely because a Portuguese arrival in India would end his monopoly on the East. Now his own portrait hangs on their flag, and a Portuguese captain politely explains him to an Indian official — the god reduced to a picture in someone else's story. The last line seals it with Semele, the mortal mother burned to ash by the sight of Jupiter: the closest witness Bacchus has, and she could only recognize him from a painting.
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