Pallas, Lausus and the Pity of War
The Civil Wars were fresh in living memory as Virgil wrote the Aeneid. Virgil was well aware of the suffering war had inflicted upon the inhabitants of Italy. He was himself from the northern Italian town of Mantua. His earlier collection of poems, the Eclogues, preserves a love for idyllic, rural Italy. But some of his characters appear disgruntled too:
‘Some godless and ungrateful soldier will take over my carefully tended fields.’
‘See where civil strife has brought us poor citizens.’
Virgil's Fondness for Italy:
Virgil’s love of rural Italy helps appreciate why the suffering of warfare comes through in his writings.
Task 1: how many examples can you find to support the aspects of Virgil's writing?
Aspect of Virgil’s Writing | Example(s) |
Origin stories behind place names | · Mound named after Palinurus explained by the Sibyl in Book 6 · |
Descriptions of the landscape | · |
Descriptions of the Italian peoples | · |
N.B. you can find a copy of this table in the appendix of your Aeneid Book X booklet.
Pallas and Lausus: Killed before their Time
The fate of these two youths conveys Virgil’s own understanding of war’s merciless nature. Another example is Euryalus (Book IX).
Task 2: complete the following:
Feature | Pallas | Lausus |
How are they shown entering the war? | ||
How does Virgil indicate that they are outmatched because of their youth? | ||
How do their father’s react to the death of their sons? | See Book 11 | |
How does Aeneas react to their deaths? |
N.B. you can find a copy of this table in the appendix of your Aeneid Book X booklet.
Task 3: plan the following essay:
Key Scholars:
You can use these in your essay:
W. H. Semple says:
War must be portrayed at least somewhat positively, as war and the making of empire, was very positive for the Romans, particularly for Augustus. Aeneas must be portrayed (at least to an extent) as a “primeval ancestor of Rome, a prototype of the historic qualities by which many great Roman soldiers and statesman, and especially Augustus had consolidated their country in strength, unity and peace.”
Virgil “is not a man of war and is describing war, not from life as does Homer, but from a distillation bended by his imagination from reading Greek poetry and history. Virgil in truth hated war.” Semple argues you can see this from Virgil’s earlier works (the Eclogues and Georgics) where the civil wars left a “deep mark, partly in the sadness he feels at the destruction of human happiness and prosperity and at the desolation caused in the countryside.”
Eve Adler says:
Aeneas’ Italian peace settlement in Book 12 represents in small the universal peace settlement to be concluded by Vergil’s contemporaries. This settlement, indeed, is Aeneas’ founding of ‘Rome’. Aeneas does not choose the site of Rome, does not erect any walls or buildings there, and does not institute any laws or political regime in any usual sense. He founds Rome by making a peace settlement in Italy.