very close to the wind. The book is dominated by a series of passionate speeches by Dido, of reproach, entreaty, bitterness, curses.
The hero speaks only once, pleading the imperative instructions of Jupiter. There is nothing else he can say. He is right to go, but
he does not cut a good figure. As he sails hastily away, Dido invokes eternal enmity between Carthage and Rome, and kills herself.
Aeneas finally lands in Italy in Book 6, and is immediately told to visit the Underworld. The sombre splendours of this book lead
him through the stages of his past life, meeting his own dead, as well as the traditional inhabitants of the lower world. He is not
spared a terrible encounter with Dido, who in death refuses to forgive him or to speak to him, and at last turns away to the
company of her first husband, 'who answered her cares and matched her love'. A last bitter twist of the knife: even Dido is better
off than the isolated Aeneas. This is the only happy marriage we ever see in the Aeneid; and it is among the dead. Aeneas is left in
no doubt that he destroyed Dido, and he can only say that he did not intend it.
In the second half of the poem he will find himself destroying other things, too. Juno stirs up a fearful war with a coalition of
Italian peoples, and Books 9 to 12 are full of epic fighting. Aeneas finds an unexpected ally, an aged Greek king named Euander,
who entrusts his son Pallas to the hero, to learn from him to be a warrior. Pallas is killed, and Aeneas feels bitterly responsible. He
himself is forced to kill the attractive young Etruscan prince Lausus, who persists in attacking him to rescue his own father:
Aeneas weeps over Lausus' body. He tries repeatedly to make peace with King Latinus and his recalcitrant people, but they break
the truce and force him into battle. His fighting rage is at last aroused, and he slaughters great numbers of the Italians; yet these are
peoples who are to live together in peace, and the war is horrible, a kind of civil war. The poem ends with another masterly
transformation of a Homeric scene. The Italian champion Turnus finally comes face to face with Aeneas, in a duel deliberately
reminiscent of the duel between Achilles and Hector. Turnus is wounded, he falls; he admits defeat and begs for his life. Aeneas is
about to spare him, his fighting rage is subsiding-and then he sees round Turnus' waist the belt which he stripped from the body of
Pallas when he slew him. Inflamed with anger, Aeneas avenges the death of his young friend by killing Turnus, and the epic ends
with the lines
A deadly chill his loosening limbs invades:
His soul lamenting passes to the shades.Such an ending reminds us that in the Iliad Hector was killed in Book 22, and that two books followed in which Achilles came to
terms, first with the other Achaeans, and then with his enemy Priam. Here there is no such healing process of reconciliation, and
the work ends with the act of killing-an act which could easily have been made less disturbing. Turnus is a killer, and his death is
just; but Aeneas would have liked to spare him, if he could. That is Virgil's deepest reflection on the nature of imperialism: that it
is a hard and lonely destiny, in which the conqueror repeatedly finds himself destroying what he -would prefer to spare. By his
victory Aeneas wins the hand of the young princess Lavinia, an ingenue who had been betrothed to Turnus, and who never speaks
in the poem. Unlike Odysseus' wife Penelope, and unlike the Dido he has been forced to leave and to destroy, this young girl will
not be a wife to console the loneliness of the battered hero-who in any case will live for only three years.