Aeneid, Book 11 — The Funeral of Pallas; the Aristeia and Death of Camilla

Reading Troy — chapter 49 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 11

Aeneid, Book 11 — The Funeral of Pallas; the Aristeia and Death of Camilla (Day after the central battle of Book 10; the funeral procession from the camp to Pallanteum; the Italian council in Latinus's hall; the cavalry-battle and Camilla's death on the plain)

The book opens with the funeral of Pallas. Aeneas dresses the body in two of his finest cloaks (gifts from Dido — Virgil's quietest cross-reference: the woman whose death Aeneas caused has provided the burial-cloth for the boy whose death Aeneas could not prevent). The body is laid on a bier of branches; the eight Italian young men taken captive in Book 10 are killed at the side of the bier as human sacrifice (Virgil includes this Iliad 23-modelled detail with deliberate moral discomfort). The procession sets out for Pallanteum. A truce is arranged with the Italian side for the burial of the dead.

The arrival at Pallanteum is one of the cycle's most-mourned scenes. Evander, the old king, comes out to meet the body of his only son. He falls on the bier; he speaks the cycle's longest single father's lament for a son fallen in war. The speech runs nearly a hundred lines in Dryden's English; the structural answer to Andromache's lament for Hector and Hecuba's for Polyxena, now in a father's voice. Evander asks only one thing: that Aeneas avenge Pallas by killing Turnus. The promise is taken; the cycle's most-determining single oath is sworn.

The Italian-side council in Latinus's hall is the book's middle movement. King Latinus speaks: the war is going badly; the gods are not with us; let us seek peace; Lavinia can marry Aeneas; we will have lost only the time and the dead. The Latin envoy Drances supports him with a stinging speech against Turnus — Drances has long resented Turnus's claim on Lavinia and the council, and his rhetoric is brutal. Turnus rises to answer. He gives one of the cycle's most-quoted defiance-speeches: he will not yield; if the gods are against him he will die fighting; he will face Aeneas in single combat if Aeneas will accept. The proposal is accepted; the duel is set for the next day. But messengers arrive: Aeneas is marching on the city; the cavalry must be sent out to meet him.

The book's last movement is the cavalry-battle and the aristeia and death of Camilla. The Volscian queen, introduced in Book 7's catalogue, leads the Italian cavalry against the Trojan-Etruscan horse on the plain outside the city. Virgil's account of the battle is one of the Aeneid's most beautiful set-pieces. Camilla is the cycle's third great warrior-maiden after Penthesilea and the cycle's many lesser warrior-women, and Virgil gives her the longest individual portrait. She is dedicated to Diana, raised in the wilderness by her exiled father Metabus (who tied her as an infant to a spear-shaft and threw it across a river to save her from pursuers; Diana caught the spear in flight). She fights with a Lycian quiver and a Spartan myrtle-bow. She kills man after man — Eunaeus, Liris, Orsilochus, Butes, Aunus — in a virtuosic aristeia.

Apollo's sister Diana, watching from heaven, knows her favourite is fated to die. She sends the nymph Opis down with one specific arrow — a sacred shaft, to avenge Camilla on whoever kills her. Camilla, in the heat of her killing, is distracted by the gold armour of a Trojan priest of Cybele named Chloreus, who is riding by; she stops her aristeia to chase the gold (Virgil's quietest moral verdict: even the dedicated maiden can be undone by ornamental desire). The Etruscan Arruns shoots her with a sacred-vowed arrow from cover; he prays to Apollo as he shoots; the arrow is granted; it strikes Camilla in the breast. She falls; she calls her closest companion Acca to bear word to Turnus that he must take the field; she dies. Opis fulfils Diana's commission: she shoots Arruns from cover with the avenging shaft, and he dies on the same plain. The cycle's most-mourned warrior-maiden gets her own avenger by the goddess's express command.

Camilla's death breaks the Italian cavalry. They retreat in disorder to the city. Turnus, who has been waiting in a wooded pass to ambush Aeneas, hears of Camilla's death too late; he leaves his ambush to ride back to defend the city; Aeneas, marching through the pass, just misses him. The two armies arrive at the walls at evening on opposite sides. The book closes with the single combat between Aeneas and Turnus formally set for the next day — the duel that Book 12 will deliver.

Analysis

The cycle's longest funeral and longest mourning

Aeneid 11 opens with the cycle's longest single funeral sequence. Virgil gives nearly two hundred lines to the funeral of Pallas — the dressing of the body, the procession, the arrival at Pallanteum, Evander's lament — and the length is doing structural work. The cycle has staged many funerals (Patroclus's in Iliad 23, Hector's in Iliad 24, Achilles's in Posthomerica 3, Anchises's funeral games in Aeneid 5), but this one is the most morally weighted. It is the funeral of an alliance-given son, killed because his father trusted Aeneas to protect him; it is the funeral that produces the oath driving the poem to its close; it is the funeral attended by an old father who has nothing left in life but his grief. Evander's lament is the Aeneid's most-quoted father's grief, and Virgil's choice to give it nearly a hundred lines of the book is a deliberate moral weight against the war the funeral is part of.

The Dido reference

Virgil's quiet detail that Aeneas dresses Pallas's body in two cloaks given him by Dido is one of the cycle's most-noticed small touches. The cloth Dido wove herself, gifts of her love at Carthage, becomes the burial-shroud of the boy whose death Dido did not live to know about. The cross-reference works in both directions: it reminds the reader of Dido's love (and Aeneas's debt to her); it reminds the reader of what Aeneas's mission has cost (the woman whose love he refused, the boy whose protection he failed). Virgil is showing that Aeneas carries all his losses with him — Dido's gifts are not in storage somewhere, they are being used to bury his foster-son. The cycle's quietest piece of carried grief.

The human sacrifice

The eight Italian young men killed at Pallas's pyre are the cycle's most disturbing single piece of Iliad-modelled barbarism in the Aeneid. Virgil's choice to include this detail is deliberate. Achilles killed twelve human captives at Patroclus's pyre in Iliad 23.175-176; Aeneas kills eight at Pallas's, the parallel is exact. The cycle's reader is invited to feel the same discomfort the Augustan-period reader would have felt — Roman law had long since explicitly banned human sacrifice (Pliny the Elder records the senate decree of 97 BCE); the cycle's exemplary Roman is performing a ritual the cycle's contemporary Romans considered barbaric. Virgil's reader has to ask whether pietas in extremity is its own opposite.

The Italian council

The Italian council in Latinus's hall is the cycle's most morally balanced political debate. Drances's speech against Turnus is well-argued and self-interested both; Turnus's reply is brave and disastrous both; Latinus's appeal for peace is wise and weak both. Virgil refuses to settle the moral question of who is right. The reader sees competent men making bad decisions for understandable reasons, and the cycle's political wisdom is that this is what wars consist of. The Aeneid's most realistic single piece of council-writing.

Camilla

Camilla is the Aeneid's most-loved minor character and the cycle's most-developed warrior-maiden. Virgil gives her the long back-story of her infancy (her father Metabus throwing her tied to a spear across the river; Diana catching the spear; the child raised in the wilderness on milk of mares); her dedication to Diana; her virgin status; her devoted followers (Larina, Tulla, Tarpeia); her speed (she can run across water without wetting her feet); her death by the avoidable distraction of Chloreus's gold armour. The cycle's quietest moral verdict — that even the dedicated maiden can be undone by ornamental desire — is one of Virgil's most acute small judgements. Camilla is the cycle's structural rhyme with Penthesilea in Posthomerica 1 (the Amazonian warrior-queen who dies fighting the protagonist's army); both queens are mourned by their goddess-patrons (Penthesilea by Aphrodite, Camilla by Diana); both produce a divine avenger (Penthesilea by Aphrodite cursing Achilles via Thersites; Camilla by Diana sending Opis to kill Arruns). The cycle's reading of warrior-maidens has been consistent across a thousand years.

Diana's commissioned avenger

The Diana-sends-Opis episode is one of the cycle's most explicit pieces of god-commissioned-vengeance. Diana cannot save her favourite from fate, but she can ensure that the killer dies for the killing. Opis the nymph is sent with one specific sacred arrow; she shoots Arruns from cover; she returns to Diana. The episode is one of the Aeneid's most theologically clean acts of divine intervention — the goddess does not interfere with fate but does enforce her honour. The contrast with Apollo killing Achilles in Posthomerica 3 (the god killing the hero face-down) is the cycle's quietest study of how gods avenge their dependents.

Dryden's elegies

Dryden's English in Book 11 is at its elegiac best. Evander's lament gets the full heroic-couplet treatment with the formal weight Virgil's Latin invites; Camilla's death-scene is rendered with the slow restraint the material demands; her last commission to Acca ("Acca, my sister...") is given the formal cadence of a farewell. The translator handles the morally weighted human sacrifice passage briskly without making it sound like spectacle; the council in Latinus's hall is rendered with the formal weight of a Roman senate debate. The book benefits throughout from Dryden's most consistent register.

What to watch for

• Book 12 will deliver the duel between Aeneas and Turnus; the poem's ending hinges on Aeneas's recognition of Pallas's swordbelt.
• Camilla's death effectively breaks the Italian field-force; the rest of the war is fought from the city's walls.
• Evander's oath drives the poem to its close: Aeneas must kill Turnus to keep faith with the dead boy's father.
• Opis the nymph's revenge on Arruns is one of the cycle's most theologically clean acts of god-commissioned vengeance.
• Drances will reappear briefly in Book 12 as the voice of peace in the Italian city; his survival contrasts with Turnus's death.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

The funeral of Pallas is the cycle's structural rhyme with Iliad 23's funeral of Patroclus, with the eight human captives sacrificed at the bier echoing the twelve Iliad 23 captives at Patroclus's pyre. Virgil's mapping is exact; the moral discomfort is also exact (Augustan Roman law had banned human sacrifice). The Dido-cloaks reference reaches back to the cycle's most-quoted dead woman; the Aeneid is the only epic in the cycle that uses textile gifts as cross-book emotional carriers (Helen's textile depictions of the war in Iliad 3 and Odyssey 4 are the cycle's similar use). Evander's lament reaches back to the cycle's chorus of parent-laments for war-dead: Hecuba and Andromache and Thetis and Hecuba again, now joined by Evander. The cycle's only old-father lament for a son in this register is in this book. Camilla's portrait reaches back across the cycle to Penthesilea in Posthomerica 1 (the warrior-queen who dies in her own aristeia, mourned by her goddess-patron); the cycle's two warrior-maidens are structural rhymes, and Virgil knows Quintus's Penthesilea (or at least the Aethiopis tradition) directly. The detail of Diana sending Opis to avenge Camilla reaches back to Aphrodite cursing Achilles via Thersites for Penthesilea's death in Posthomerica 1; the cycle's pattern of goddess-commissioned vengeance for fallen warrior-maidens is consistent across a thousand years of poetic tradition. The cavalry-battle in which Camilla fights is the cycle's clearest extended cavalry-set-piece (the Iliad's cavalry are individual heroes; the Aeneid's cavalry is a force), and Virgil's account is one of his most-imitated battle-pieces.

Forward echoes

Book 12 is the immediate sequel and the final book: the duel between Aeneas and Turnus; the killing of Turnus when Aeneas sees Pallas's swordbelt on him; the abrupt close. The funeral of Pallas drives the entire next book: Evander's oath, exacted in this book, becomes the moral and political reason for Aeneas's killing of Turnus in the next. The cycle's most-determining single oath is sworn in this book and discharged in the next. Camilla's death effectively breaks the Italian field-force; the rest of the war (Book 12's setup, the duel) is fought from and outside the city walls rather than on the open plain. Drances will reappear briefly in Book 12 as the voice of peace in the Italian city; his survival contrasts with Turnus's death, and the cycle's quiet moral judgement is that the men who counsel peace and lose tend to outlive the men who counsel war and win their counsels. Latinus will preside silently over the duel of Book 12. Amata, the queen, will commit suicide when she believes Turnus dead — the cycle's second female suicide. The cycle's pattern of Aeneas-as-Roman-protagonist receiving the Iliadic Patroclus-and-vengeance pattern is being closed by these two books. Camilla as a character has had enormous afterlife: Dante's Inferno places her among the noble pagans in Limbo; medieval and renaissance writers gave her a sustained literary presence; Boccaccio's De Mulieribus Claris gave her a chapter; she is one of the cycle's most-imitated minor female characters in subsequent European literature.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — leads the funeral procession of Pallas; performs the sacrifice; swears the oath to Evander; marches to the city walls
• Evander — receives his son's body at Pallanteum; speaks the cycle's longest father's lament; extracts the oath against Turnus
• Pallas — dead; the body in funeral procession; the cycle's most-mourned young warrior
• Camilla — Volscian queen; leads the Italian cavalry; aristeia of kills; distracted by Chloreus's gold armour; shot by Arruns; dies after sending word to Turnus
• Turnus — defies the Latin council; accepts single combat with Aeneas; sets ambush; leaves it too late on news of Camilla's death
• Latinus — king of Latium; speaks for peace in the council; overruled by Turnus
• Lavinia — silent in her father's hall; the disputed bride; the war still being fought for her hand

Mentioned / off-stage

• Dido — long dead; her gift-cloaks are used to dress Pallas's body for burial
• Hera — Juno; not in this book directly; her interventions have been answered by Jupiter's neutrality
• Amata — Latinus's wife; in the palace; will commit suicide in Book 12 when she believes Turnus dead
• Achilles — long dead; the Iliad 23 funeral of Patroclus is the structural template, including the human sacrifice
• Patroclus — long dead; the twelve human captives at his pyre are the model for the eight here
• Penthesilea — long dead; the cycle's earlier warrior-maiden; Camilla's structural rhyme

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.