The Queen and the Horse
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Mais avante bebendo seca o rio Mui grande multidão da Assíria gente, Sujeita a feminino senhorio De uma tão bela como incontinente. Ali tem junto ao lado nunca frio, Esculpido o feroz ginete ardente, Com quem teria o filho competência: Amor nefando, bruta incontinência!
Further on, a vast multitude of the Assyrian people drinks the river dry, subject to a woman's rule — a woman as beautiful as she was unchaste. There, beside her flank that is never cold, is carved the fierce and burning stallion with which her own son would find himself in rivalry: unspeakable love, brutish lack of restraint!
An image of Semiramis, queen of Assyria, whose army drinks a river dry and whose appetite ruled her people. Beside her is carved the stallion of the old legend, and her own son is named as its rival.
The stanza shows Semiramis, the Assyrian queen, in two images at once. First an army so large it drinks a river dry as it marches — the standard ancient way of saying a host beyond counting. Then the queen herself, with a carved horse set beside her, and a single line that turns the picture: her son is the horse's competitor.
The thing a first reader slides past is what "competência" means here. It is not a contest of arms; the son and the animal are rivals for the same bed. Camões does not narrate the legend, he only lets the word sit there and then names it in the last line — nefando, the thing not to be spoken. The moral is placed under the military image on purpose: an empire that can dry up rivers is being weighed by what its ruler cannot control in herself.
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Os Lusíadas 7.53 — The Great Library Project interlinear edition · greatlibraryproject.com/book/lusiadas/7.53/