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on battlefields but also in political debates in the Senate and in political trials in the courts. In both arenas, lies, calumny, melodrama, confrontational debate, all the vices of rhetoric, had been common coin. The Augustan settlement took the power from these arenas and lodged it with the
princeps
, and the style of government changed. Augustus had no love for the liberties which had destroyed the republic and had no intention of allowing them to weaken his own position. We may remember that Anchises in the Underworld started his litany ofthe areas in which Greeks would surpass Romans by saying ‘Others will plead cases better’ (6.849), a calculated obliteration of the memory of Rome’s greatest orator. Augustus had connived at the killing of Cicero in 43 BC . He would also have enjoyed Virgil’s demolition of rhetoric.
The Death of Mezentius
    According to an ancient commentator the
Aeneid
is written to imitate Homer and to praise Augustus with respect to his family. But panegyric is raised to poetry by Virgil’s deep sense that victory has its price. The Latin warriors, we have seen, are courageous and upright, and they and their women suffer the cruelty of war. Dido is a noble queen who died a death she did not deserve, and Virgil so told her story that for over two millennia men have grieved for her. Turnus is the great enemy of the hero of the epic, but by the end of it he has claims to our admiration and pity. Mezentius is a villain through and through, a monster of cruelty to his subjects and a scorner of the gods, but when he stands alone against all his enemies we begin to admire him. When he refuses to cut down Orodes from the rear and manoeuvres to meet him face to face, we know we are in the presence of a hero. The most revealing moment comes with his answer to Orodes’ dying taunt: ‘Die now. As for me, that will be a matter for the Father of the Gods and the King of Men’ (743–4). The scorner of the gods is now admitting and accepting the supremacy of Jupiter. It is almost as though Virgil had not the heart to let the villain die a villain. When the balance of Mezentius’ life is about to swing from wickedness to tragedy, Virgil’s sympathies reach out towards him.
    Soon Mezentius is wounded by Aeneas, and would have been killed had not his son Lausus so loved his father, that, lightly armed as he was, he threw himself between the combatants. Aeneas kills him, and when he sees his dying face and features, the face ‘strangely white’, he is reminded of his love for his own father (821–2) and we too are reminded of it when Virgil here refers to Aeneas by his patronymic,
Anchisiades
, son of Anchises. Our sympathies are divided. Then, while Mezentius is trying to recover from his wound on the banks of the Tiber,he hears the wailing in the distance and knows the truth, and bursts into a paroxysm of grief and self-hate. Before Mezentius goes to fight his last battle, like Achilles in the
Iliad
, he addresses his horse, and each man’s utterance is a testimony to human and animal courage and the obstinacy of affection. Nothing in Mezentius’ life becomes him like the leaving it.
    Crude panegyric is unrelieved, direct praise with no regard for truth. The panegyric of the
Aeneid
praises Augustus, intermittently and often obliquely, and it is always based upon a genuine and intelligent response by the poet to the contemporary political situation. It also takes in a great sweep of human experience. While saluting the victor and acclaiming his victories, Virgil records the sufferings of the defeated and of the innocent. He also acknowledges the cost to the victors in the persons of Aeneas and Augustus.
BOOK 11
DRANCES AND CAMILLA
    Pallas is mourned and his funeral rites conducted. The Latins send an embassy to Aeneas to beg a truce in order to gather up their dead. He consents and makes it clear that the war was not of his choosing. Turnus could have met him in single combat and only one man would