“The worst moment?” Aeneas ponders for a while. “The worst moment was coming up the river in the Etruscan ships—my few men, and the Greeks Evander had sent with me, and the Etruscans from Caere. I was counting on getting up to our camp at sunrise. I had no idea what had been going on, of course, but I was worried. Young Pallas had been hanging around me all night, talking, asking questions—King Evander’s son.”
“I knew him when we were children,” I said. “He took me to the wolf’s den near Pallanteum.”
“He was a nice boy. Very excited, the night before his first battle. Poor boy, poor Evander… Well, Pallas kept chattering, but the feeling that something was wrong kept growing on me. We came over the bar, into the river, as the air began to get grey. I saw stuff floating downstream all around us. Driftwood, I thought, from a storm higher up the river. But it was all black. A big chunk bumped up against our prow. It was the stern of a ship, charred, eaten away by fire. The river was full of pieces of burned ships floating along with the current.
“Tarchon and Astur from Caere came up beside me, and Astur asked after a while, Are they yours?’ I said yes. I had seen the figurehead of the Ida go by. Achates was with me there, and after a while he said, ‘It must be the whole fleet.’ I thought so too.
“I said, ‘No bodies.’ For there was nothing but the fragments of the ships. But that was no cheer. It looked as if they’d taken our camp, burned the ships, slaughtered the people.
“I said to Tarchon, ‘I fear I’ve brought you to a lost battle,’ but he shook his head. ‘Wait and see,’ he said. The Etruscans are strange people, they seem to live half in the other world. So we put on armor, in case of arrows from shore when we landed, and we rowed on up the river thick with broken burnt wood. You could smell the stink of burning.
“We rounded the long curve just as the sun rose. I saw our fort, our camp. The ships were gone but the earthworks were standing, and there were men on them, guards—in Trojan helmets. My heart gave a leap, and I held up my shield as high as I could and shouted out to my people in the camp. The first sunlight struck the bronze in a great flare of light. And the men on shore shouted back, first the guards, then a roar from them all. They weren’t dead, they weren’t asleep. They were ready. After that, I never really worried much about the outcome of it all.”
I remember Aeneas’ words as I remember the poet’s words. I remember every word because they are the fabric of my life, the warp I am woven on. All my life since Aeneas’ death might seem a weaving torn out of the loom unfinished, a shapeless tangle of threads making nothing, but it is not so; for my mind returns as the shuttle returns always to the starting place, finding the pattern, going on with it. I was a spinner, not a weaver, but I have learned to weave.
My judgment of turnus is that he could not look farther than the moment. His response to emergency was instant, active, complete; where he failed and wavered was in following through, holding to a purpose. That of course is where Aeneas excelled. In emergency, at the moment of choice, Aeneas might hesitate, confused, looking to the outcome, torn between conflicting claims and possibilities: in a torment of indecision he groped for his purpose, his fate, till he found it. Then his choice was made and he acted on it. And while he acted, his purpose was unwavering. Afterwards he might agonise over it all again, question his conscience endlessly, never fully satisfied that he had done the right thing.
But Turnus never looked back, as he never looked forward.
I think he was truly fearless: but a man without fear is one who lacks a quality of humanity. Men followed him for his brilliant daring, but he did not take charge of them. He met the event as it came, and so events buffeted him and blew him about, and he lost sight of what had to be done, and seemed to act on whim. So he broke a treaty, twice, without a thought. So more than once he left the battlefield, abandoned his men without guidance. And at last, when he had to face the implacable, he seemed to act in a kind of panic. But it was not fear, even then. It was recklessness meeting the reckoning.
Aeneas, who does not forgive himself, will not grant me even this tempered judgment; he will say of Turnus only, “He was young.”
At any rate, Turnus certainly could rise to the unforeseen. He pulled his Rutulians and their allies together at the first sight of the Etruscan ships sweeping up the river in the sunrise, and was ready with a fighting force to meet Aeneas and his allies as they landed.
Some of the ships could land within the Trojan earthwork, but the current brought others to shore outside it, and the men disembarking were at a great disadvantage as Turnus’ men attacked them. Archers and lancemen on the ships covered them with the iron rain, and the Trojans sallied out of their camp to defend them. Many Italians, Trojans, Greeks, Etruscans never saw the noon of that morning. And the killing went on and on. Up the riverbank they fought, and over the green lawns and through the thickets of the shore. The Trojans were tremendously heartened by their leader’s return, and Aeneas had to keep them from wild charges that would scatter them out, since even with the new reinforcements they were far outnumbered. He kept them, Serestus told me, in good defensive order around their camp and the Etruscan ships, so they had a fallback if they needed it. And the battle went on in the heat of the June day, hour after hour, man against man.
Turnus was enraged with Evander for allying with the Trojans against him. When he saw Evander’s son Pallas dueling with young Lausus, he saw a chance of vengeance. He shouted out that this was his fight, and made Lausus stand back. Pallas made a brave attempt to fight, but Turnus killed him with one awful blow of his bronze-pointed oak spear through his shield and through his body. Then he stood over him. “Send him back to his traitor father the way he deserves to get him,” he said, and putting his foot on the dying boy, he yanked with main force at the heavy, gold-plated weapon belt across his shoulder till he tore it off. And he strode off with the trophy, waving it in the air and laughing.
When Aeneas heard of this, the fury came into him. He told Serestus to keep the Trojans together, and went looking for Turnus. He killed men along the way, left and right, ruthless, relentless. He was the mad dog among the sheep now. The Latins fell back from him as the Trojans had fallen back from Turnus in the camp.
But Turnus himself was nowhere. After killing Pallas, he disappeared. No man I ever talked to knew what became of him during the long hour that Aeneas stalked him through the battlefield, challenging him, calling out to him to come fight. No doubt he was resting, catching his breath somewhere up the hill in the shade, but he chose a strange time to do it.
It was Mezentius, the old Etruscan tyrant, who met Aeneas face to face. Men who saw it said the two fought as equals. When Aeneas wounded the older man in the thigh with a spear, Mezentius’ men gathered round him and got him mounted on a horse, while his son Lausus covered their retreat. Young as he was, Lausus came bravely at Aeneas. After shouting in vain at him not to try to attack, Aeneas killed him with a single sword stroke. Then he followed Mezentius to the riverbank. When they told him his son was dead, the old tyrant turned and called out to Aeneas: “Come on, then! What does my death matter now?” and charged. Aeneas had to kill the horse with a blow between the eyes. Wounded, pinned under the fallen horse, the old man fought like a bear until Aeneas cut his throat.
Many Italians who saw that fight asked why it was Mezentius, not Turnus, fighting the Trojan captain.
The fury went out of Aeneas then. He went back to where Pallas lay and gave orders, in tears, that the boy’s body be wrapped to carry back to his father, Evander, with a guard of honor, though not with slaves to be sacrificed, as the poet said; I do not know how my poet could think his own Italian people would commit such barbarity. Perhaps the Greeks might. Though all my poet sang was true and is true, yet there are small mistakes in the truth of it, and I have tried to mend those tiny rents in the great fabric as I tell my part in it. So, then, Aeneas withdrew his men from the field. The Italians were already withdrawing, not to their siege position round the Trojan camp but miles farther back towards the city.