Thus they hurried on, the child holding by his father’s right hand, and dragging after with “unequal steps,”—
dextræ se parvus Iulus
Implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus æquis.
—Virg. Æn., lib. ii. 1. 723.
And thus Æneas bore away both father and son, and the penates, or household gods, of his family, which were to be transferred to another country, and become the future guardians of Rome—
Ascanium, Anchisemque patrem, Tencrosque penates.—Ib., 1. 747.
No. 12. The Flight of Æneas.
In this case we know that the design is intended to be a parody, or burlesque, upon a picture which appears to have been celebrated at the time, and of which at least two different copies are found upon ancient intaglios. It is the only case I know in which both the original and the parody have been preserved from this remote period, and this is so curious a circumstance, that I give in the cut on the preceding page a copy of one of the intaglios.[8] It represented literally Virgil’s account of the story, and the only difference between the design on the intaglios and the one given in our first cut is, that in the latter the personages are represented under the forms of monkeys. Æneas, personified by the strong and vigorous animal, carrying the old monkey, Anchises, on his left shoulder, hurries forward, and at the same time looks back on the burning city. With his right hand he drags along the boy Iulus, or Ascanius, who is evidently proceeding non passibus æquis, and with difficulty keeps up with his father’s pace. The boy wears a Phrygian bonnet, and holds in his right hand the instrument of play which we should now call a “bandy”—the pedun. Anchises has charge of the box, which contains the sacred penates. It is a curious circumstance that the monkeys in this picture are the same dog-headed animals, or cynocephali, which are found on the Egyptian monuments.