The tragic, somber, final line of the Aeneid and the epic poem’s ringing, declamatory opening line signify the two emotional poles of the epic. Their positioning has a symbolic as well as a narrative importance, for between the moods to which they give voice, the poem constantly moves back and forth as it unfolds. The establishment of Rome is achieved only through the human suffering of Aeneas and his people, and of his opponents—Dido in the first half of the epic, and now, at the end, Turnus.
Virgil’s vision of reality was too honest to allow him to see life other than as a mixture of good and evil elements. Had Virgil been merely a propagandist for Augustus, he might easily have finished the epic on a triumphant note. For example, he could have concluded it with the conversation between Jupiter and Juno in this final book, with the king of the gods assuring his consort of a glorious future for the Romans, whose protector she would happily become.
Instead, Virgil gives the epic’s final line to the last moment in Turnus’s life, the moment that marks the utter, hopeless defeat of a man who is stripped of his glory and virility and becomes a moaning ghost. Aeneas’s victory is complete, but it must be paid for by the downfall of a worthy enemy, for whom nothing remains but a retreat into the shadows of the underworld.
The epic’s final lines, “And with a groan for that indignity / His spirit fled into the gloom below,” are the same that, in the preceding book, described Camilla’s death. The repetition reinforces the likeness between Camilla and Turnus, friends and allies in a battle for a lost cause, both cut down in the prime of their youth.
Turnus’s fate, however, unlike Camilla’s, is mitigated by his inability to control his emotional rage. This lack of control reaches its height in Book XII, which we expect since the book details the final conflict between Turnus and Aeneas. The rage Turnus felt at the end of Book XI carries over to the beginning of Book XII, in which his passion is described as “hot and unquenchable.” Virgil, as he did earlier with Dido, associates Turnus’s intense feelings with fire. The uncontrollable lust that consumes the Carthaginian queen is similar to Turnus’s overwhelming craving for Lavinia: “Desire stung the young man as he gazed, / Rapt, at the girl. He burned yet more for battle.” The greater Turnus’s passion for Lavinia, the greater his wanting to do battle, yet his military judgment is clouded by his passion for the young princess. As Virgil notes of Turnus toward the poem’s end, “He did not know himself. His knees gave way, / His blood ran cold and froze.”
Surprisingly, Turnus redeems himself—at least partly—when he finally accepts that it is not his fate to win against Aeneas. We sympathize with Turnus’s plight, especially when, speaking resignedly to his sister, he acknowledges the ignoble afterlife that awaits him. His speech to her is notable for its timeless questioning of what death holds for all of us: “To die—is that / So miserable?” Ultimately, Turnus’s greatest fear is not dying; his greatest concerns are the opinions that others will have of him after he is dead and, as with all of the other warriors in the poem, how his reputation will affect his family’s good name.
Aeneas, who wants nothing more than to end the war, rouses himself to battle as passionately as his antagonist does, but Aeneas’s reasons for wanting to do battle are radically different from Turnus’s. Aeneas understands that by fighting Turnus one on one, only he or the Rutulian will die, and not the many warriors who would were the all-out war to continue. Even when large-scale battle again breaks out, Aeneas does not kill any of his enemies; instead, he seeks Turnus exclusively, knowing that if the renegade warrior is killed, then his followers will cease fighting. As Aeneas tells Latinus, he wants no kingdom for himself. His only goal, as it has been throughout the entire epic, is to build a city in which he and his displaced countrymen can settle peacefully.
The fight that finally ensues between Aeneas and Turnus is described as earth-shattering. After all, the fate of the civilized world hangs in the balance. Virgil emphasizes the universal importance of the battle when he writes that the earth groaned from the crashing of the warriors’s shields. Even more cataclysmic is the groan “heard echoing on all sides from all / The mountain range, and echoed by the forests” when the Rutulians realize their leader has fallen. The epic poem has been leading up to this grand finale, and every detail here at its end furthers the sheer magnificence of the founding of Western civilization’s greatest empire.
