THE DEATH OF PALLAS.
The scene changes to Olympus, where Jupiter holds a council of the gods.
He is as much troubled as in the Iliad with the dissensions in his own
court, and holds the balance with difficulty between his queen and his
daughter, each unscrupulous in their partisanship. Venus complains to
him bitterly of the peril in which her son Æneas stands, by reason of
Juno’s machinations. That goddess replies, with considerable show of
reason, that Æneas has brought his troubles upon himself; that Latinus
and Turnus and Lavinia were all going on peacefully before he came; and
that--if the whole history of the Trojans must needs be discussed
again--Venus herself, by her instrument Helen, was the mother of all the
mischief. The king of the gods somewhat loses patience, and swears by
the great river of Styx, with the awful nod which shakes Olympus, that
Trojan and Rutulian shall even fight it out, and the Fates shall decide
the question. So he dissolves the Olympian convocation.
The fight at the Trojan encampment is renewed in the morning as
fiercely as ever. But succours are on their way. The ships of the
Etruscan leader Tarchon--the name which future kings of Rome were to
bear with little alteration--have been sailing all night down the
Tyrrhenian Sea, under their new-found chief Æneas. His galley leads the
van; and with him in the stern--for he takes the helm himself--sits
young Pallas, hearing him tell of the great deeds of old. The poet gives
us something like a muster-roll of the Etruscan chiefs and their
followings; more interesting perhaps to the ear of a Roman, who would
catch up here and there some historical allusion to a place or family
with which he claimed some connection, than to the modern reader, who
can have no such sympathies. He gives us, too, the figure-heads from
which the ships of the most noted captains took their names: the
Tiger--a favourite, it would seem, to our English nautical taste even
down to the present day--the Centaur, the Apollo, the Triton, the
Mincius--the last-named from the river that flowed by Virgil’s own town
of Mantua,--
“Fair town! her sons of high degree,
Though not unmixed their blood;
Three races swell the mingled stream:
Four states from each derive their birth:
Herself among them sits supreme,
Her Tuscan blood her chiefest worth.”
Æneas has a strange rencontre in his night-voyage. Suddenly there rises
round his galley a circle of water-nymphs--they are his own vessels,
thus transformed, and their errand is to warn him of the danger in
which Iulus and his people lie. The sight which meets his eyes as he
enters the Tiber at daybreak confirms their tidings: he sees the camp
surrounded by enemies. Standing high upon his deck, he raises aloft the
wondrous shield. The Trojans recognise in the signal the arrival of the
help they so sorely need, and welcome it with prolonged shouts. Then
their enemies note it also,--and the fight grows fiercer still.
Tarchon--who seems to act as captain of the fleet under Æneas as
admiral--looks out a good place to beach the galleys, bids the men give
way with a will, and runs them well up, the forepart high and dry--all,
except the gallant captain himself, whose vessel breaks her back and
goes to pieces.
Turnus has left the command of the storming-party to his lieutenants,
and gone down himself with a picked force to oppose Æneas’s landing. The
Arcadian contingent, unused to fighting on foot and half in the water,
get into confusion, and turn. Young Pallas gallantly rallies them, for
the honour of his countrymen. He himself wins his spurs, in this his
first field, by deeds which would become Æneas himself. One brief
episode in his exploits is pathetic enough. There are fighting on the
Rutulian side the twin-brothers Thymber and Larides:--
“So like, the sweet confusion e’en
Their parents’ eyes betrayed;
But Pallas twin and twin between
Has cruel difference made;
For Thymber’s head the steel has shorn;
Larides’ severed hand forlorn
Feels blindly for its lord:
The quivering fingers, half alive,
Twitch with convulsive gripe, and strive
To close upon the sword.”
Young Lausus, the son of the tyrant Mezentius, is leading his men
against Pallas, when a greater soldier interposes between the two young
heroes. Turnus comes, and Pallas meets him eagerly--yet not without full
consciousness of the inequality of the combat. He hurls his spear, so
strongly and truly that it penetrates through Turnus’s shield, and
slightly grazes his body. Then Turnus launches his weapon in return, and
it goes right through the metal plates and tough ox-hide of the shield,
and through the corselet of Pallas, deep into his breast, and the young
prince falls to the ground writhing in his dying agony. Turnus stands
astride of the corpse, and shouts triumphantly to the discomfited
Arcadians. Yet there is something generous, according to the fierce code
of the times, in his treatment of his dead enemy; he neither strips the
armour, nor makes any attempt to prevent the Arcadians from carrying off
the body. He bids them bear it home to King Evander for burial; only
with a warning as to what fate awaits the allies of the foreigner:--
“Who to Æneas plays the host,
Must square the glory with the cost.”
One trophy he takes from the person of the dead prince--a belt richly
embroidered in gold with the tale of the daughters of Danaus. He girds
it on over his armour, unconscious of the influence it will have upon
his own fate.
Æneas, in a different quarter of the field, hears of the death of his
young esquire, and furiously hews his way towards Turnus. All who cross
his path, veteran chiefs and young aspirants to glory, alike go down
before him, and no appeal for mercy checks his hand. Eight prisoners he
takes alive; but only with the intent to slay them as victims at the
funeral pile of Pallas. But the rival champions do not meet as yet.
Juno, fearing the issue of an encounter with Æneas in his present mood,
cheats the eyes of Turnus with a phantom in his enemy’s shape. When
Turnus meets it in the fight, the shape turns and flies towards the
ships, pursued by him with bitter taunts on Trojan cowardice. One galley
has her gangway down, and the false Æneas takes refuge on board. Turnus
follows; when the moorings are loosed by an invisible hand, the galley
floats down stream, and the Rutulian, raving and half determined to end
his disgrace by suicide when he finds out how he has been cheated, is
swept along the coast to his own town of Ardea.
Mezentius takes his place, and seconded by his son Lausus, spreads
slaughter amongst the Trojan ranks. But a spear cast by the strong hand
of Æneas lodges in the groin of the father, and the son gallantly rushes
forward to cover his retreat. Æneas warns the youth to stand back--some
thought, it may be, of Pallas makes him unwilling to take the younger
life; but Lausus dares his fate, and the Trojan falchion, driven home
through his light shield and broidered vest--
“The vest his mother wove with gold”--
reaches the young chief’s heart. Æneas can be generous too. He will not
strip the body; nay, he chides the cowardice of Lausus’s comrades, who
hesitate to lift the dying youth, and himself raises him carefully from
the ground, and gives him what comfort may be gathered from the fact
that he has met his death “at Æneas’s hand.”
Mezentius hears of the death of his son as he lies by the river-bank
bathing his wound. “With a cry of agony the father bewails his own
crimes, which had thus brought death upon his innocent son. Crippled as
he is, he calls for his good horse Rhæbus, who has ever hitherto borne
him home victor from the battle. To-day they two will carry home the
head of Æneas, or fall together. He charges desperately upon the Trojan,
who is right glad to meet him. Thrice he wheels his horse round his wary
enemy, hurling javelin after javelin, which the Vulcanian shield
receives on its broad circumference, and retains until it looks, in the
poet’s language, like a grove of steel. At last Æneas launches a spear
which strikes Mezentius’s horse full in the forehead, and poor Rhæbus
rears, and rolling over in his dying agonies, pins his master to the
ground. Æneas rushes in upon the fallen champion, who, disdaining to ask
quarter, bares his throat to the sword, and dies as fearlessly as he has
lived.