Virgil seems to have followed the more horrible tradition, which appears also in some of the Greek dramatists, that Achilles fastened Hector to his chariot while still alive. The shade of the dead hero had come to warn Æneas not to throw away his life in a hopeless resistance. Troy must fall: but to Æneas, as the hope of his race, the prince of the house of Priam formally intrusts the national gods of Troy and the sacred fire of Vesta, to be carried into the new land which he shall colonise. It is a formal transfer of the kingdom and the priesthood to the younger branch--the line of Assaracus. Æneas awoke, as he goes on to tell, to hear the war-cries of the Greeks and the clash of arms within the city. Already the storming-party had attacked and set fire to the house of Deiphobus,--to whom Helen, willing or unwilling, had been made over on the death of Paris; and therefore naturally the first point which Menelaus made for. Æneas himself is summoned by a comrade, Panthus, to come to the rescue. The first despairing words of Panthus have a pathos which has made them well known. No English idiom will express with equal brevity and point the Latin “_Fuimus_”--“We have been--and are not,” for this is understood.[19] “_Fuimus Troes_”--Mr Conington’s translation gives the full sense, but at the expense of its terseness:-- “We have been Trojans--Troy has been-- She sat, but sits no more, a queen.” It was a phrase peculiarly Roman. So they used the word “Vixi”--“I have lived”--in epitaphs, to express death; though in this, as in so many cases, the turn of the expression is due to that euphemism, which refrained from using any words of direct ill omen. “The father of the gods,” says Panthus, “has transferred all our glory to Argos.” There was a story (alluded to in one of the lost tragedies of Sophocles, of which we have but a fragment) that on the night of the capture of Troy the tutelary deities departed in a body, taking their images with them. It is a singular parallel to the well-known tradition, that before the fall of Jerusalem supernatural voices were heard in the night exclaiming, “Let us depart hence!” The Romans had a regular formula for the evocation of the gods from an enemy’s city, and inviting them, with promises of all due honours and sacrifices, to transfer their seat to Rome; and to attack any city without these solemn preliminaries was held to bring a curse on the besiegers.[20]