It is in realizing the temper of the poem that we realize the temper of its hero. Æneas is the Arthur of the Vergilian epic, with the same absorption of all individuality in the nobleness of his purpose, the same undertone of melancholy, the same unearthly vagueness of outline and remoteness from the meaner interests and passions of men. As the poet of our own day has embodied his ideal of manhood in the king, so Vergil has embodied it in the hero-founder of his race. The temper of Æneas is the highest conception of human character to which the old world ever attained. The virtues of the Homeric combatants are there: courage, endurance, wisdom in council, eloquence, chivalrous friendship, family affection, faith to plighted word; but with these mingle virtues unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, nobleness and unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and the weak. In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded Æneas with the ties and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens the loss of Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to clasp my arms about her neck,"--everyone knows the famous lines:-- "Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp, Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp, As wind or slumber light."