Turnus is the anti-hero, the character who, because of his ignoble behavior, is fated to die. His wish that Pallas’s father, Evander, were present to witness his son’s death recalls Pyrrhus’s horrific killing of Politës, witnessed by the young soldier’s father, Priam. Once Turnus kills Pallas, he boasts of his accomplishment; worse, he defames the sanctity of death when he steps on Pallas’s dead body and then dishonorably removes the fallen man’s swordbelt. Of these actions, Virgil comments, “The minds of men are ignorant of fate / And of their future lot, unskilled to keep / Due measure when some triumph sets them high. / For Turnus there will come a time / When he would give the world to see again / An untouched Pallas, and will hate this day, / Hate that belt taken.” Turnus is a poor winner who will pay—with his life—for his insolent behavior.
Aeneas, on the other hand, greatly respects a warrior’s code of conduct. Faced with Pallas’s death, his actions underscore his humaneness, for death is not trivial to him as it is to Turnus. Remembering the time he spent with Pallas and Evander, Aeneas offers sacrifices in the young soldier’s name. Later in the book, he again exhibits noble qualities when he mourns the death of Lausus, an enemy. Visibly moved by this death, Aeneas “groaned in profound pity. He held out / His hand as filial piety, mirrored here, / Wrung in his heart.” Of all the characters in the poem, Aeneas knows best the “empty rage” and “painful toil” of war.
It is in Book X, which focuses almost entirely on the war between the Trojans and the Latins, that Virgil most closely embraces Homer’s Iliad as a model for his own epic poem. For example, the council of the gods recalls the beginning of the Iliad’s Book VIII, in which Zeus convenes his fellow gods and orders them not to interfere in the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. More important, apart from this and other specific references to Homer’s epic, Virgil echoes the overall tone of the Iliad’s battle scenes. Like Homer, he succeeds in convincing us of his characters’s humanity. They remain accessible to feelings of love and sympathy even in the midst of struggle and death.
