Aeneid, Book 12 — The Duel of Aeneas and Turnus; the Poem's Abrupt Close

Reading Troy — chapter 50 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 12

Red-figure vase: The Duel of Aeneas and Turnus; the Poem's Abrupt Close

Aeneid, Book 12 — The Duel of Aeneas and Turnus; the Poem's Abrupt Close (Day after Camilla's death in Book 11; the plain before the walls of Latinus's city; the duel-ground; the city's hall; the cycle's last book)

The morning opens with the formal preparations for the single combat. Turnus arms in his own city; Aeneas arms in his camp; the truce is sworn between Latinus and Aeneas at a great public altar — solemn vows that whichever combatant falls, the other's people will inherit the kingdom, that Lavinia will marry the survivor, that the war will end. The cycle's most carefully sworn oath.

The truce is broken by Juno through her instrument the nymph Juturna, Turnus's sister, who fears for her brother's life. She inflames the Rutulian Tolumnius to throw a spear into the Trojan line; the spear kills the Trojan-side Gylippus; the truce collapses; both armies rush back into battle. Aeneas is wounded in the thigh by an unknown arrow (Virgil hints Juturna's hand) as he tries to halt the fighting; he is carried back to the camp. The physician Iapyx cannot remove the arrow-tip; Venus arrives in person, infuses the herb dittany into the water of the bath, the arrow falls out, the wound closes. Aeneas returns to the field.

He looks for Turnus; Juturna, disguised as Turnus's charioteer, drives Turnus's chariot in evasive zigzags so the prince cannot find his enemy. Aeneas, frustrated, decides to attack the city itself — the war's strategic centre — to force Turnus to face him. The Trojan army assaults the walls; battering rams against the gates; fire-arrows; ladders. Inside the city, the Latin women and the elderly panic. Queen Amata, watching from the palace, believes Turnus already dead; she goes to her chamber and hangs herself. The cycle's second female suicide.

Turnus hears the news of Amata's death and of the assault on the city. He cuts off the evasive driving; he leaves Juturna; he calls a halt to all general fighting; he goes alone to the city gate to meet Aeneas in the duel that should have been fought hours before. The two armies fall back to watch.

The duel is brief and Virgil-finished with deliberate care. Both men cast spears; both shafts deflected by shields. They close with swords. Turnus's sword (an old weapon, not his usual one — Juturna in her confusion gave him the wrong sword in the chariot-confusion) shatters on Aeneas's Vulcan-armour at the first stroke. Turnus is now defenceless; he runs; Aeneas pursues. They go five times around an oak-tree before the duel resumes. Jupiter sends a Fury in the shape of a small owl that flies in Turnus's face; Juturna recognises the sign that her brother's time is up; she leaves him.

Aeneas catches up. He casts his great spear; it goes through Turnus's thigh; the Rutulian falls to one knee. Turnus, defeated, looks up. He speaks the cycle's most famous suppliant-speech. "I have deserved this, and I do not ask my life. Use your fortune. But if any care for an unhappy father can move you, I beg you (and your own father Anchises lived also) — pity Daunus my father in his old age, and either restore me to my own people or, if you will, send back my dead body. You have won; the Italian people have seen me beaten; I cede Lavinia to you. The hostility ends here. Stretch your hatred no further."

Aeneas pauses. The cycle's most-debated single hesitation. He is moved; the speech of the old father weighs on him; he was about to spare Turnus. Then his eye falls on Turnus's shoulder. Pallas's swordbelt — embossed with the Danaid murder of the bridegrooms, stripped from the boy's body in Book 10 — is across Turnus's chest. The recognition burns. Aeneas's face changes. He cries: "You — wearing the spoils of my Pallas! Pallas it is that strikes you, Pallas that takes this sacrifice from your impious blood." He drives the sword into Turnus's chest. The Rutulian limbs are loosened in chill; his soul flees indignant down to the shades. The poem ends with this single line.

The cycle's most-debated single ending. The Aeneid stops mid-action; there is no scene of cleanup, no scene of marriage to Lavinia, no scene of Roman foundation, no scene of mourning. Aeneas's sword goes in, Turnus's spirit flees, the poem ends. Virgil left the work formally unfinished at his death in 19 BCE; some commentators have read the abrupt ending as deliberate (the cycle's grimmest single judgement on what founding-violence costs); others have read it as merely incomplete (Virgil intending to write more). The cycle has been arguing about this ending for two thousand years.

Pen-and-ink: The Duel of Aeneas and Turnus; the Poem's Abrupt Close

Analysis

The Aeneid's ending and its long debate

The Aeneid's last twenty lines — Aeneas's pause, the recognition of Pallas's swordbelt, the killing of Turnus, the indignant spirit fleeing down to the shades — are among the most-debated lines in all of European literature. Two main readings have contended for two thousand years. The first, the "Roman" reading, takes Aeneas's killing as the just discharge of his oath to Evander, a piece of necessary founding-violence, the moment when pietas requires the leader to do what mercy would forbid; Virgil endorses Augustan Rome's founding by showing it had its grim costs but was finally right. The second, the "Augustan-critical" reading, takes the killing as a moral failure — Aeneas the man of pietas surrendering to the same furor (raging passion) that has driven Juno and Turnus throughout the poem; Virgil's last word is a quiet indictment of what founding-violence costs the soul of the founder. Both readings are textually possible. The cycle's reader has had two millennia to choose, and the choice has tracked the politics of every era in which the Aeneid has been read.

The swordbelt's payoff

The swordbelt of Pallas is the cycle's most precisely engineered piece of intertextual machinery. Introduced in Book 10 when Turnus stripped it from the dying boy; named twice in Aeneid 10.495-505 with Virgil's authorial intervention ("the day will come when Turnus shall wish at any price these spoils untouched"); carried in silence through Book 11's funeral procession (we hear of it once when Aeneas dresses Pallas in Dido's cloaks, the belt being missing from the body); recognised in Book 12's last twenty lines as the trigger of Turnus's death. The object's three-book arc is one of the cycle's most precisely composed pieces of structural foreshadowing-and-payoff. Virgil's reader, having watched the belt go from Pallas to Turnus and waited two books to see Aeneas see it, gets the moment of recognition exactly as foreshadowed. The cycle's longest single act of intertextual engineering.

The suppliant-speech and Aeneas's pause

Turnus's suppliant-speech is the cycle's structural answer to Priam's speech to Achilles in Iliad 24. The pattern is precise: a defeated enemy at the killer's mercy invokes the killer's father (Priam invokes Peleus; Turnus invokes Anchises); the killer pauses; the killer's response decides everything. The two scenes are placed in deliberate cross-cycle moral contrast. Iliad 24's Achilles, the killer of Priam's son, hears Priam invoke Peleus and is moved; he weeps; he gives back Hector's body; he feeds Priam supper; he sends him safe home. Aeneid 12's Aeneas, the killer of Pallas's lover (the political-not-erotic sense), hears Turnus invoke Daunus and is briefly moved; he then sees Pallas's swordbelt; the recognition breaks the moment; he kills Turnus. The cycle's reader is meant to hold the two scenes together: the same situation, the opposite response. The Aeneid's deepest moral question is whether Aeneas does what Achilles did not (the harder duty) or fails to do what Achilles did (the harder mercy). Virgil refuses to settle the question.

Furor versus pietas

The cycle's most-discussed moral vocabulary runs through the last scene. Aeneas's defining adjective throughout the poem is "pius" (pious, dutiful, restrained); the antagonist Turnus and the chief obstructress Juno have been defined by "furor" (rage, frenzied passion). The Aeneid's structural argument from Book 1 forward has been that pietas would defeat furor and produce Roman peace. The closing scene complicates this. Aeneas kills Turnus "fervidus" (burning, on fire); his eyes "kindle" (ardentia); he is described in furor's vocabulary at the killing. The cycle's question is whether pietas in its grief-driven extremity is its own opposite, or whether founding-violence requires the leader to draw on furor to discharge his pietas. Virgil's choice to end the poem on Aeneas in furor's register is one of the cycle's most morally significant moves.

The unfinished ending

Virgil died in 19 BCE before completing the Aeneid; tradition records that he had wanted the manuscript burned, and that Augustus overruled this command and had Varius and Tucca edit it for publication. Whether the abrupt ending of Book 12 — no closure, no marriage scene, no foundation scene, no mourning, the poem stopping on Turnus's fleeing spirit — was Virgil's intended ending or a sign of the work's unfinished state is one of the cycle's longest-running debates. The "intentional abruptness" reading is strong; the ending has the structural completeness of a tragic closure (the protagonist's culminating act, the question raised about its moral weight, the silence after); other ancient long epics also end on a single combat (the Iliad ends on Hector's funeral but the action of the war is closed at Hector's death). Whatever Virgil intended, the abruptness has become the Aeneid's defining feature: the cycle's most-quoted final line is the cycle's most morally inconclusive.

Amata's suicide

Amata's suicide in the city, while the duel-preparations are happening, is the cycle's second female suicide (after Dido). The structural rhyme is exact: a woman whose hopes for political alliance have been crushed by the foreign-bride war ends her life by her own hand while the war's resolution is being arranged. Virgil's parallel is one of his quietest indictments of the war's cost. Two queens have died to make Roman peace possible — one Carthaginian, one Latin; the second only barely Roman-side (Amata had wanted Turnus). The cycle's grim arithmetic on female suicides.

Dryden at the close

Dryden's English in Book 12 is at its formal Augustan best for the duel-preparations, the truce-oaths, the wounding of Aeneas. The suppliant-speech of Turnus gets the full heroic-couplet treatment with Virgil's careful restraint preserved. The closing recognition of the swordbelt and the killing of Turnus is given the formal weight without softening the abruptness: "He rais'd his arm aloft, and, at the word, / Deep in his bosom drove the shining sword. / The streaming blood distain'd his arms around, / And the disdainful soul came rushing thro' the wound." The cycle's last lines in Dryden's English are as definitive a closing as English heroic couplets can give the Latin's abruptness. The translator's strength in formal cadence serves Virgil's formal silence well.

What to watch for in the Odyssey

The Odyssey opens with Odysseus on Calypso's island in his seventh year of detention; Aeneas was in his seventh year when he reached Carthage. The two heroes' journeys are deliberately rhymed.
The Odyssey's Helen at Sparta is the cycle's most ambivalent woman in her domestic prime — hold against Aeneid 6's Deiphobus revelation.
Achilles's shade in Odyssey 11 (preferring slavery on earth to kingship among the dead) is the cycle's quietest comment on what fame costs the hero.
The Odyssey's wandering is the cycle's Odyssean original; reading it after Aeneid 1-6 (the Aeneid's Odyssean half) gives both their proper weights.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Aeneid 12's duel is the cycle's most precisely composed single piece of cross-cycle structural rhyme. Turnus's suppliant-speech is the cycle's structural answer to Priam's speech to Achilles in Iliad 24.477-512: a defeated suppliant invokes the killer's father; the killer pauses; the killer's response defines him. Iliad 24's Achilles spared and fed and sent home the king whose son he had killed; Aeneid 12's Aeneas kills the man who killed Pallas. The two scenes are placed in deliberate moral opposition; the cycle's reader is meant to feel the gap. Pallas's swordbelt with its Danaid frieze, introduced in Book 10 and recognised here, is the cycle's longest single intertextual machinery. The cycle's two female suicides — Dido in Book 4 and Amata in Book 12 — bracket the second half of the Aeneid and produce the cycle's grimmest pattern of women whose deaths discharge what men's wars require. Aeneas's "furor"-laced killing reaches back to Achilles's pursuit of Hector around the walls in Iliad 22.165-247 (five-times-around-the-city becomes five-times-around-the-oak); the structural rhyme is intentional. Turnus is the cycle's structural answer to Hector, with the differences that Hector died defending his actual city against an invader who had no original quarrel with him, and Turnus dies defending a Lavinia he had been promised against a refugee whose claim is by oracle alone. The cycle's two "killed-by-the-protagonist" antagonists are placed in deliberate moral contrast, and Turnus's death is the more morally ambiguous because his claim is more conventionally legitimate. Camilla's death in Book 11 was the cycle's third great female-warrior death (Penthesilea in Posthomerica 1, the Iliadic Andromache and Hecuba and Helen in various registers); the cycle's pattern of female casualties has tracked all three epics.

Forward echoes

The Aeneid ends and the cycle's fourth epic, the Odyssey, opens its window. The Odyssey is set in Odysseus's tenth year of nostos — the cycle's Greek-side answer to Aeneas's seven-year-wandering plus three-year-Italian-war total of ten. The two heroes' journeys are deliberately rhymed in their structural lengths. The Aeneid's abrupt ending becomes one of the cycle's most generative single literary facts. Dante's Commedia (c. 1308-1321) takes the Aeneid 6 underworld as its premise and Virgil himself as its guide; the Inferno's Circle of Limbo includes Camilla, Penthesilea, and the great noble pagans of the cycle. Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) takes the Aeneid's formal register and its theological seriousness; Satan's defiance-speeches owe much to Turnus. Statius's Thebaid (c. 92 CE) closes with a similar duel-of-mutual-revenge but spends more time on the aftermath; Virgil's choice to end before the aftermath becomes Statius's recognised structural reproach. Through every later European epic — Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, Camões's Lusíadas, every later national-foundation epic — the Aeneid's question of whether the protagonist's culminating act was justified is rephrased and re-asked. The cycle's most morally ambiguous ending becomes Western literature's most-debated single piece of closing-violence. Virgil's deathbed wish (according to tradition) that the unfinished manuscript be burned was overruled by Augustus; the Aeneid as we have it is therefore both the cycle's last finished epic (in narrative terms) and the cycle's deepest piece of authorial uncertainty about its own moral resolution. The cycle's Posthomeric-Aeneid arc closes here; the Odyssey takes the cycle's last word.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

Aeneas — sworn to single combat; wounded by Juturna's arrow, healed; kills Turnus when he sees Pallas's swordbelt; the cycle's most-debated single act
Turnus — kills the Trojan in the broken truce; loses his sword in the chariot-confusion; speaks the cycle's most-quoted suppliant-speech; killed by Aeneas
Aphrodite — Venus; heals Aeneas's wound with dittany
Hera — Juno; instruments the truce-break through Juturna; consents at last in heaven to Roman peace (her surrender-speech to Jupiter is the cycle's last Juno-scene)
Zeus — Jupiter; sends the Fury-owl to drive Juturna from her brother; receives Juno's consent
Latinus — king of Latium; swears the truce-oaths with Aeneas; presides over the aftermath
Amata — Latinus's queen; believes Turnus dead; hangs herself in her chamber; the cycle's second female suicide
Lavinia — silent through the entire book; the prize and the future of the kingdom

Mentioned / off-stage

Pallas — long dead; his swordbelt on Turnus's shoulder is the recognition that triggers Aeneas's killing-stroke
Evander — old king at Pallanteum; his oath to Aeneas is being discharged by this killing
Achilles — long dead; the Iliad 24 Achilles-and-Priam scene is the cycle's structural counterpart to Aeneas-and-Turnus
Priam — long dead; Turnus's invocation of Daunus is the cycle's structural rhyme with Priam's invocation of Peleus to Achilles
Anchises — long dead; named by Turnus in the suppliant-speech; Aeneas almost spares him on this invocation alone
Dido — long dead; her silent shade in the underworld is the cycle's structural rhyme of Aeneas-and-Turnus (a defeated suppliant met by Aeneas who shows mercy or does not)

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.