Æneas awoke, as he goes on to tell, to hear the war-cries of the Greeks and the clash of arms within the city. Already the storming-party had attacked and set fire to the house of Deiphobus,—to whom Helen, willing or unwilling, had been made over on the death of Paris; and therefore naturally the first point which Menelaus made for. Æneas himself is summoned by a comrade, Panthus, to come to the rescue. The first despairing words of Panthus have a pathos which has made them well known. No English idiom will express with equal brevity and point the Latin “Fuimus”—“We have been—and are not,” for this is understood.[19] “Fuimus Troes”—Mr Conington’s translation gives the full sense, but at the expense of its terseness:—
“We have been Trojans—Troy has been—
She sat, but sits no more, a queen.”
It was a phrase peculiarly Roman. So they used the word “Vixi”—“I have lived”—in epitaphs, to express death; though in this, as in so many cases, the turn of the expression is due to that euphemism, which refrained from using any words of direct ill omen.
“The father of the gods,” says Panthus, “has transferred all our glory to Argos.” There was a story (alluded to in one of the lost tragedies of Sophocles, of which we have but a fragment) that on the night of the capture of Troy the tutelary deities departed in a body, taking their images with them. It is a singular parallel to the well-known tradition, that before the fall of Jerusalem supernatural voices were heard in the night exclaiming, “Let us depart hence!” The Romans had a regular formula for the evocation of the gods from an enemy’s city, and inviting them, with promises of all due honours and sacrifices, to transfer their seat to Rome; and to attack any city without these solemn preliminaries was held to bring a curse on the besiegers.[20]
Æneas is anxious to assure his fair listener that, in spite of Hector’s adjuration to fly, he did all that man might do in defence of his king and his countrymen. He had rallied a band of brave men, and for a while made head against the enemy. They were favoured by the mistake made by a party of Greeks, who took them for friends in the darkness, and whom they cut to pieces, and having arrayed themselves in their armour, dealt destruction in the enemy’s very ranks. But all resistance was in vain. The appearance of Neoptolemus—Pyrrhus—the “Red-haired”—and the comparison of the young warrior in his strength and beauty to the serpent who comes forth after casting its winter slough, is fine in the original, and finely translated:—
“Full in the gate see Pyrrhus blaze,
A meteor, shooting steely rays:
So flames a serpent into light,
On poisonous herbage fed,
Which late in subterranean night
Through winter lay as dead:
Now from its ancient wounds undressed,
Invigorate and young,
Sunward it rears its glittering breast,
And darts its three-forked tongue.”
And the fate of the unhappy Priam is an equally beautiful picture, of a different tone:—
“Perhaps you ask of Priam’s fate:
He, when he sees his town o’erthrown,
Greeks bursting through his palace-gate,
And thronging chambers once his own,
His ancient armour, long laid by,
Around his palsied shoulders throws,
Girds with a useless sword his thigh,
And totters forth to meet his foes.”
Hecuba, who with her women is clinging to the altar, rebukes her husband for this mad attempt to match his feeble strength against the enemy. Still, when Pyrrhus rushes into the hall in pursuit of one of Priam’s sons, Polites, and slays him full in the father’s sight, the old man hurls a javelin at the Greek chief, with a taunting curse upon his cruelty. But it is
“A feeble dart, no blood that drew;
The ringing metal turned it back,
And left it clinging, weak and slack.”