[124] 27:18. =Laocoon.= A priest of Apollo appointed to act as priest of Neptune. The famous group of Laocoon and his two sons in the coils of the twin serpents, of the Pergamenian type of sculpture, was discovered in the baths of the Emperor Titus, and stands in the Belvidere of the Vatican Museum. [125] 29:8. =Calchas.= Priest of the Greeks. [126] 29:14. =Sons of Atreus.= Agamemnon, king of Mycenæ, commander-in-chief of the Greeks, and his brother Menelaus of Sparta, former husband of Helen. [127] 29:27. =Phœbus.= Apollo, god of prophecy. [128] 31:16. =Palladium.= Statue of Pallas, the Greek goddess identified by the Romans with Minerva, goddess of wisdom, of household arts, and of war. Also called Tritonia. [129] 32:7. =Pelops.= Son of Tantalus and father of Atreus. He was served up as food for the gods by his father, restored to life by Jupiter, and furnished with an ivory shoulder in place of the one eaten at the banquet. He gained control of the Peloponnesus, or Morea, which was named for him. The use here, another case of the specific for the generic, is in place of Greece itself. [130] 33:27. =Cassandra.= Daughter of Priam and Hecuba. Priestess of Apollo. When she offended Apollo, he could not take back the prophetic power which he had given her, but he decreed that her prophecies should never be believed. [131] 34:17. =Hector.= Of this passage Fénelon wrote, “Can one read this passage without being moved?” Châteaubriand called the scene “a kind of epitome of Virgil’s genius.” [132] 35:9. =Vesta.= So Æneas is to be apostle to the heathen. Even the early Christians reverenced the vestal sisters, prototype of church sisterhoods. The institution known as the Vestal Virgins was the purest element of the Roman religion; even emperors intrusted their last wills to their sacred keeping as the most inviolable of safeguards. Their convent has recently been excavated near the Roman Forum. [133] 38:36. =Nereus.= A sea-god, father of the Nereids. [134] 40:3. =Andromache.= Daughter of King Eëtion, wife of Hector, the eldest son of Priam and the most famous warrior of the Trojans, finally slain by Achilles and dragged around the walls of Troy. [135] 40:17. =Pyrrhus.= Son of Achilles. Also called Neoptolemus. After fighting in the Trojan war, he founded a kingdom in Epirus. [136] 41:17. =Hecuba.= Chief wife of Priam. She really was the mother of nineteen children. Poetic license treats her as the queen mother of all Priam’s fifty daughters-in-law and fifty daughters, and finally includes them all under the term daughters-in-law. [137] 43:13. =Creusa.= Wife of Æneas and mother of Ascanius or Iulus. [138] 43:21. =Tyndareus.= Father of Helen. [139] 46:2. =Flame.= In this passage Virgil makes Anchises refer to a previous capture of Troy by the Greek hero Hercules, at which time King Laomedon was slain; and, secondly, to Jupiter’s punishment of Anchises himself for boasting of the love of Venus. Jupiter crippled him by a thunderbolt.