Practice Exam Set: Aeneid X Lines 773–790

Mezentius prays — but not to any god. His right hand is his deity, his levelled spear his oracle. The vow he makes is doubly impious: he replaces the gods with himself as the object of prayer, and he promises to dress his living son Lausus in the armour of a man not yet dead. Both gestures define what the examiners call his contemptor divum character — the scorner of gods — and both are about to be answered.

The spear flies and misses Aeneas entirely. It strikes Antores instead — Hercules' companion, who had left Argos to follow Evander to Italy and had made his home there. He dies of a wound meant for someone else, and as he dies he looks up at the sky and remembers the sweet city he came from. Dulcis moriens reminiscitur Argos. It is one of Virgil's most famous half-lines, and its power comes entirely from its brevity: a life, a home, a death, compressed into five words.

Aeneas then wounds Mezentius with a javelin to the groin — real damage, but not fatal. The wound is enough. Lausus sees his father's blood, and everything changes. These lines mark the pivot on which the entire Mezentius episode turns: from warrior confrontation to something far more intimate and far more devastating.