Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.[2] But the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife, but father and household accompany Æneas. Life, he tells them when they bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the "commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with Æneas, and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen. Not merely the will of the gods drives him from Carthage, but the sense of the wrong done to his boy.[3] His friendship is as warm and constant as his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate regret. It is the vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death, but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been blotted out by the shame and terror of his fall ("quantum mutatus ab illo Hectore!"), but the gory hair and the mangled form only quicken the passionate longing of Æneas.[4] The tears, the "mighty groan," burst forth again as in the tapestry of the Sidonian temple he sees pictured anew the story of Hector's fall. In the hour of his last combat the thought of his brother-in-arms returns to him, and the memory of Hector is the spur to nobleness and valour which he bequeaths to his boy.