Practice Exam Set: Aeneid X Lines 833–856

Mezentius sits by the Tiber, resting his wound against a tree trunk, his heavy armour laid out in the grass. He keeps sending riders to find Lausus and bring him back. Each one returns without him. When the body arrives — carried on a shield by weeping soldiers, the great wound visible — Mezentius understands before anyone speaks. His mind, Virgil says, was already forewarned by grief: praesaga mali mens.

What follows is the transformation the entire book has been building. The tyrant — the scorner of gods, the king driven from his throne for crimes too monstrous to name — becomes a father. He defiles his white hair with dust. He throws both arms toward heaven. He clings to the body. His speech is one of the most shattering in the poem: was his desire to go on living so great that he let his son die in his place? He names his own crimes. He names the shame he brought on Lausus's name by being what he was. He says he should have given his life for his people long ago, died for his crimes himself, died by every possible death. Instead Lausus died.

He resolves not to outlive it. He calls for his horse. The monster has become, in grief, entirely human — and in doing so, he becomes the figure Virgil mourns most carefully in the book's final lines.