“So like, the sweet confusion e’en
Their parents’ eyes betrayed;
But Pallas twin and twin between
Has cruel difference made;
For Thymber’s head the steel has shorn;
Larides’ severed hand forlorn
Feels blindly for its lord:
The quivering fingers, half alive,
Twitch with convulsive gripe, and strive
To close upon the sword.”
Young Lausus, the son of the tyrant Mezentius, is leading his men
against Pallas, when a greater soldier interposes between the two young
heroes. Turnus comes, and Pallas meets him eagerly--yet not without full
consciousness of the inequality of the combat. He hurls his spear, so
strongly and truly that it penetrates through Turnus’s shield, and
slightly grazes his body. Then Turnus launches his weapon in return, and
it goes right through the metal plates and tough ox-hide of the shield,
and through the corselet of Pallas, deep into his breast, and the young
prince falls to the ground writhing in his dying agony. Turnus stands
astride of the corpse, and shouts triumphantly to the discomfited
Arcadians. Yet there is something generous, according to the fierce code
of the times, in his treatment of his dead enemy; he neither strips the
armour, nor makes any attempt to prevent the Arcadians from carrying off
the body. He bids them bear it home to King Evander for burial; only
with a warning as to what fate awaits the allies of the foreigner:--
“Who to Æneas plays the host,
Must square the glory with the cost.”
One trophy he takes from the person of the dead prince--a belt richly
embroidered in gold with the tale of the daughters of Danaus. He girds
it on over his armour, unconscious of the influence it will have upon
his own fate.
Æneas, in a different quarter of the field, hears of the death of his
young esquire, and furiously hews his way towards Turnus. All who cross
his path, veteran chiefs and young aspirants to glory, alike go down
before him, and no appeal for mercy checks his hand. Eight prisoners he
takes alive; but only with the intent to slay them as victims at the
funeral pile of Pallas. But the rival champions do not meet as yet.
Juno, fearing the issue of an encounter with Æneas in his present mood,
cheats the eyes of Turnus with a phantom in his enemy’s shape. When
Turnus meets it in the fight, the shape turns and flies towards the
ships, pursued by him with bitter taunts on Trojan cowardice. One galley
has her gangway down, and the false Æneas takes refuge on board. Turnus
follows; when the moorings are loosed by an invisible hand, the galley
floats down stream, and the Rutulian, raving and half determined to end
his disgrace by suicide when he finds out how he has been cheated, is
swept along the coast to his own town of Ardea.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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