lighted word; but with these mingle virtues
unknown to Hector or Achilleus, temperance, self-control, nobleness and
unselfishness of aim, loyalty to an inner sense of right, the piety of
self-devotion and self-sacrifice, refinement of feeling, a pure and
delicate sense of the sweetness of woman's love, pity for the fallen and
the weak.

In the Homeric picture Achilleus sits solitary in his tent, bound as it
were to the affections of earth by the one tie of his friendship for
Patroclos. No figure has ever been painted by a poet's pen more terrible
in the loneliness of its wrath, its sorrow, its revenge. But from one
end of his song to the other Vergil has surrounded AEneas with the ties
and affections of home. In the awful night with which his story opens
the loss of Creusa, the mocking embrace in which the dead wife flies
from his arms, form his farewell to Troy. "Thrice strove I there to
clasp my arms about her neck,"--everyone knows the famous lines:--

"Thrice I essayed her neck to clasp,
Thrice the vain semblance mocked my grasp,
As wind or slumber light."

Amid all the terror of the flight from the burning city the figure of
his child starts out bright against the darkness, touched with a
tenderness which Vergil seems to reserve for his child-pictures.[2] But
the whole escape is the escape of a family. Not merely child and wife,
but father and household accompany AEneas. Life, he tells them when they
bid him leave them to their fate, is worthless without them; and the
"commune periclum, una salus" runs throughout all his wanderings. The
common love of his boy is one of the bonds that link Dido with AEneas,
and a yet more exquisite touch of poetic tenderness makes his affection
for Ascanius the one final motive for his severance from the Queen. Not
merely the will of the gods drives him from Carthage, but the sense of
the wrong done to his boy.[3] His friendship is as warm and constant as
his love for father or child. At the two great crises of his life the
thought of Hector stirs a new outpouring of passionate regret. It is the
vision of Hector which rouses him from the slumber of the terrible night
when Troy is taken; the vision of the hero not as glorified by death,
but as the memory of that last pitiful sight of the corpse dragged at
the chariot wheels of Achilleus had stamped it for ever on the mind of
his friend. It is as though all recollection of his greatness had been
blotted out by the shame