Æneas bids him mount with him into his chariot, and together they will encounter this redoubtable Greek. Pandarus takes the spear and shield, while Æneas guides the horses. Diomed is still fighting on foot, when Sthenelus, who attends him with the chariot, sees the two hostile chiefs bearing down upon him. He begs his comrade to remount, and avoid the encounter with two such adversaries. Diomed indignantly refuses. He will slay both, with the help of Heaven; and he charges Sthenelus, if such should be the happy result, to leave his own horses and chariot, securing the reins carefully to the chariot-front, and make prize of the far-famed steeds of Æneas—they are descended from the immortal breed bestowed of old by Jupiter upon King Tros. So, on foot still, he awaits their onset. Pandarus stands high in the chariot with poised weapon, and hails his enemy as he comes within hurling distance:—
“Prince, thou art met! though late in vain assailed,
The spear may enter where the arrow failed.”
It does enter, and piercing through the tough ox-hide of the shield, stands fixed in the breastplate. Again, with premature triumph, he shouts exultingly to Diomed that at last he has got his death-wound. But the Greek quietly tells him that he has missed—which assuredly he himself is not going to do. He hurls his spear in turn with fatal aim: and the poet tells us with ghastly detail how it entered beneath the eyeball, and passed down through the “white teeth” and tongue—
“Till the bright point looked out beneath the chin”—
and Pandarus the Lycian closes his career, free at least from the baseness which medieval romances have attached to his name.
Æneas, in obedience to the laws of heroic chivalry, at once leaps down from the chariot to defend against all comers the body of his fallen comrade.
“And like a lion fearless in his strength
Around the corpse he stalked this way and that,
His spear and buckler round about him held,
To all who dared approach him threat’ning death.”
Diomed in this case avails himself of a mode of attack not uncommon with Homer’s heroes. He seizes a huge stone—which not two men of this degenerate age (says Homer, with a poet’s cynicism for the present) could have lifted—and hurls it at the Trojan prince. It strikes him on the hip, crushes the joint, and brings him to his knees. But that his goddess-mother Venus comes to his rescue, the world had heard the last of Æneas, and Virgil must have sought another hero for his great poem.
“About her much-loved son her arms she throws—
Her arms, whose whiteness match the falling snows;
Screened from the foe behind her shining veil,
The swords wave harmless and the javelins fail.” (P.)
Sthenelus, for his part, remembers the orders of his friend and chief, and drives off at once to the Greek camp with the much-coveted horses of Æneas. Diomed rushes in pursuit of Venus—whom he knows, by his new gift of clear vision—as she carries off her son through the ranks of the Trojans. She, at least, of all the divinities of Olympus, had no business, thought the Greek, in the mêlée of battle. Besides, he had received from Minerva special permission to attack her. Most ungallantly, to our notions, he does so. The scene is such a curious one, that it is well to give Lord Derby’s version of it:—