Aeneid

For a story that looks forward to the glorious founding of Rome, Virgil’s epic is surprisingly bleak. He repeatedly emphasizes the personal cost to Aeneas, in private life, for his piety (for example, in following the will of the gods, he loses his first wife, Creusa, in Troy, then his lover, Dido, in Carthage). Worse still, Aeneas’s losses are not limited to himself; they radiate outwards. His presence causes collateral damage wherever he goes. The development of Carthage is brought to a standstill by his affair with Dido; the whole of Italy is thrown into civil war by the invasion of his Trojans. The establishment of the Roman empire is a “a task of immense scale” (Book 1, line 33), one that Virgil emphasizes cannot be achieved without deep sacrifice and loss.

Virgil exemplifies this cost with his portrayal of the senseless deaths of young people in war. He is especially interested in the pathos associated with the deaths of three key young characters: Pallas (Evander’s son, Aeneas’s ward), Lausus (the son of Mezentius, the impious Italian king), and Camilla (the Volscian warrior girl). All three are notable for their martial bravery, their virginal status, and the tragedy of their early deaths.

Pallas dies first, in Book 10. His life is brutally cut short by Turnus, who kills him surprisingly quickly. Significantly, Turnus strips Pallas’s sword-belt, which we are told is engraved with the story of the Danaids, a myth centered on women who murdered their husbands on their wedding night. Virgil concentrates not on the brides, but on their husbands: “Bridegrooms […] foully murdered by brides in an orgy of slaughter” (Book 10, line 499). The allusion is clear: Pallas was slain when he should be celebrating marriage and starting his life as a prince of Italy.

As Turnus killed Pallas, Aeneas savagely cuts down another innocent youth: Lausus. First introduced in Book 7 as the son of the cruel king Mezentius, Lausus serves as a foil for Aeneas. He loves his father deeply, his filial piety made all the more heartbreaking by how utterly undeserving his father is. Virgil’s sympathy for Lausus is clear; he actually steps into the narrative and offers comment on him: “Here I will not pass over in silence the cause of your harsh death, / Or your noble deeds, young man […] You’re worthy of being remembered” (Book 10, lines 792-94). Lausus cries when he sees his father wounded. He is not interested in killing Aeneas, but rather in safeguarding his father’s withdrawal from the battlefield. In a surprising moment, the wrathful Aeneas condemns Lausus for his loyalty to his excessive devotion (811-12). He stabs him—and the terrible and sad moment of Lausus’s death transforms Aeneas back into “the son of Anchises” (822). While the death of Pallas drove him mad, the death of Lausus sobers him.

Finally there is Camilla, whose first major action in the narrative is asking Turnus if she can face the Trojan attack herself (Book 11, 502-10). Her bravery and skill exemplify how complicated gender roles can be in the Aeneid. Raised by a boorish but loving father and nursed on the milk of wild animals, she is an image of anti-civilization. Like Pallas and Lausus, she, too, is a virgin, and like them, she is cut down in the prime of her life.

All three of these characters’ deaths are treated sympathetically by Virgil. Where we might expect a championing of masculine violence, instead we find an authorial voice that solidly sides with the suffering. It is difficult to reconcile the savagery of Books 10, 11, and 12 with the glorious vision of peaceful settlement that we might expect at the end of the Aeneid. We might see this as Virgil speaking to Augustus: Will blood lust and a desire for revenge infect you? Will it infect your successors?