Practice Exam Set: Aeneid X Lines 474–489

The duel is over in sixteen lines. Pallas throws first, with full force, praying as he throws — let Turnus's dying eyes see me stripping his armour, let the word reach Evander through a victorious death. His spear strikes Turnus's shoulder and draws blood but does not hold. Turnus takes his time. He weighs the throw, watches Pallas, delivers a taunt — aspice num mage sit nostrum penetrabile telum, see if my spear goes deeper — and throws.

It goes deeper. Through the layers of Pallas's shield, through his corselet, through his chest. Una eademque via sanguis animusque sequuntur: by one and the same path, blood and life follow. It is one of the most compressed death-lines in Latin epic — the symmetry of the Latin enacts what it describes, two things travelling together along a single path that ends in the same place. Pallas falls forward, his face striking the enemy earth, his armour ringing above him.

The asymmetry of the duel — Pallas's spear grazing, Turnus's killing with a single blow — is not a failure of courage on Pallas's part. Virgil has been careful to establish that. It is fate, played out with the precision of a theorem. The outcome was fixed before either warrior raised his arm.