The old tradition--well known, no doubt, to Virgil’s audience and first readers--was that the son, not the father, lived to enjoy the sovereignty of Latium. The hero of many vicissitudes was not held to have settled down into the peaceful rest which he looks forward to, throughout the poet’s story, as the end of all his campaigns and wanderings. The Rutulians, so said the legends, would not yet bow to the foreign usurper; and Æneas fought his last battle with them on the banks of the river Numicius, and then, like so many of the favourite heroes of a people--disappeared; either carried, living or dead, by some divine agency, to heaven, or caught away in the arms of the river-god. CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUDING REMARKS. The Æneid has two drawbacks to its popularity as an epic poem amongst modern readers. One defect is common to all classical fiction--that there is no love-romance, properly so called, on the part either of the hero or of any other male character in the poem. Love, as now understood, has no place either in Virgil or Homer. We find in their verse none of those finer shades of feeling, that loyal personal allegiance, that high unselfish devotion, the mysterious sympathy, as untranslatable by anything but itself as the most perfect wording of the poet, which, nursed, it has been said, in the lap of Northern chivalry, but surely of much older birth, has given now for centuries to poet and to novelist their highest charm and inspiration. Poets had to sing as they could without it in Virgil’s days. Augustus and Octavia, as they listened to the courtly _raconteur_, would have opened their eyes wide with astonishment if he had sung to them of the devotion of Lancelot, as surely as they would have laughed at the purity of Galahad. They understood what love was, in their fashion; many ladies of the court sympathised with Dido, no doubt. They understood well enough “the fury of a woman scorned.” They had seen a whole love-poem in real life, with the appropriate tragical _dénouement_, in Antony and Cleopatra. That was their notion of the grand passion. Probably the more shrewd among them looked upon Antony as a fool to prefer “love” to empire, and applauded Æneas’s “piety” in obeying the oracles of the gods, when they pointed to a new wife whose dowry was a kingdom. There was quite love enough in the action of the poem to suit their tastes, and at anything better or purer they would have only shrugged their fair patrician shoulders.