Æneas’s first care, after raising a trophy crowned with the arms of the slain Mezentius, is to send home to Evander the body of his son. A picked detachment escort it to Laurentum with all honour, wrapped in robes of gold--embroidered robes, wrought by the hands of the unfortunate Dido. The youth’s charger, Æthon, is led behind the bier, and his lance and helm are also borne in the procession; a custom which we have borrowed from the Romans, and retain to this day in our military funerals. Æthon weeps copious tears for his dead master; an incident not so entirely due to a poet’s imagination as it may seem, since the historian Suetonius tells us that some favourite horses of Julius Cæsar showed the same tokens of grief, and refused their food, just before his death. Another feature in the obsequies of Pallas is happily obsolete; the prisoners whom Æneas had taken alive with this express object follow behind the corpse, to be sacrificed at the funeral pile. There was nothing horrible to the polished courtiers of Augustus in such a thought. Even in that age of refinement and civilisation, the emperor himself, after the defeat of Antony’s party at Perusia, was said to have slaughtered three hundred prisoners in honour of the great Julius, to whom altars were raised as a demi-god. True, the story was probably an invention of political opponents; but the mere fact that such a story could be invented and believed, marks strongly the cruel temper of the age. The old king receives back, in bitter grief, all that remains to him of the gallant son whom he had so lately sent forth to his first fatal field: and he charges Æneas, by the mouth of the envoys, to avenge him on his son’s murderer--for this he only waits to close his own eyes. A truce of twelve days is agreed upon between the armies for the burial of their dead. The Latins have meanwhile sent an embassy to ask aid from Diomed, the hero of the Trojan war, who has come home and settled in Italy. He is paying the penalty of having wounded Venus in the battle before Troy, and is not allowed to reach his native Argolis. He warns the ambassadors that it is not good to war against the race from which Æneas comes--he, for his part, will have no more of it. At this crisis the Latins hold a council of war. Their king advises a compromise with the enemy--a grant of land on which to settle, or a new equipped fleet to carry the fortunes of Troy yet further on. Then there rises in the council one Drances, a better orator than warrior, who boldly proposes to give the princess Lavinia to the bridegroom whom the gods have sent. Or, let Turnus meet Æneas in single combat--why are the rest to suffer for his pride? Is all Latium to be steeped in blood that Turnus may have a princess to wife? Turnus is not slow to reply. He will go forth to meet the Trojan willingly--will Drances follow him?