This trophy of a comrade, can you cherish Hope that my hands would let you go? Now Pallas, Pallas exacts his vengeance, and the blow Is Pallas, making sacrifice!” He struck Before he finished speaking: the blade went deep And Turnus’ limbs were cold in death; the spirit Went with a moan indignant to the shadows. APPENDIX [Illustration: text decoration] VIRGIL’S LIFE AND TIMES Publius Vergilius Maro, whom we call Virgil, was born up north in Italy, somewhere in the vicinity of Mantua, in the year 70 B.C. Julius Caesar, that year, was a man of thirty. The poet’s father was a landholder, sufficiently affluent to afford his son a pretty extensive course of education. Virgil grew up to be tall, dark, perhaps a little rawboned and loose-jointed, never very robust, quiet, no doubt, but with more fun in him, and malice, too, if the ascription of the minor poems is correct, than we sometimes think. As a youth, he studied first at Cremona, then at Milan, and in this he was fortunate, for the scholars of the north seemed to have laid more emphasis on the humanistic side of education, on arts, letters, and philosophy, than did the materialist-minded rhetoricians of Rome. To Rome, in his late teens, Virgil did go for pre-legal study, for him a not very congenial experience; it is on record, according to Donatus, that he pleaded exactly one case, and that unsuccessfully. He was twenty-one when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, and the Civil War flared up between Caesar and Pompey, and it seems probable that he was pressed into service with Caesar’s forces, not too much against his political sympathies, however distasteful to his temperament. His service was not long: the state of his health may have brought him early leave or discharge; in his younger twenties he turned to the study of philosophy at Naples.