by Sydney Tan, PsyD

SALVE

Turnus lowers his eyes, reaches out with his right hand,
begging, a supplicant, “I deserve no mercy,” he said:
“seize your chance. But if any concern for a parent’s grief still
has the power to touch you, I pray—for you too had such a father—
pity my father in his old age and return me,
or if you prefer, my body stripped of life, to my people.
You are the victor, and I, the conquered, stretch out my hands
to you for all to see. Lavinia is your bride,
extend your hatred no further.” Aeneas stood,
shifting his gaze, holding back his sword,
delaying as Turnus’ words began to sway him more and more.
When young Pallas’ girdle, high on Turnus’ shoulder, caught his eye.
Turnus, bearing his enemy’s trophy, had
defeated Pallas, cutting him down with a wound.
As soon as his eyes took in that trophy, a reminder of his savage grief,
Aeneas, summoning forth much fury, terrible in his rage, cries,
“Escape from my grasp, dressed in the spoils of one of my own?
It is Pallas who sacrifices you, who takes retribution from your defiled blood.”
Saying this, glowing with rage, he thrusts his sword deep in
Turnus’ heart. Turnus’ limbs went limp with the coldness of death
and with a groan his life breath fled down to the shades below.

—Virgil, The Aeneid, translated from the Latin by Sydney Tan

These are the closing lines of The Aeneid. Written in the first century BC, it is more than just an apologia for Roman conquest. After a period of great turmoil and civil unrest, Augustus Caesar had gained control of the Roman army and food supply, and had appointed his friends to the Senate by manipulating and ignoring various laws, effectively seizing power over the entire kingdom. He further consolidated his power and declared himself emperor, rendering the Roman state a republic in name only. A century later, Roman historian Tacitus would describe Augustus’ systematic extension of Roman control over the much of the Western world thus: “To robbery, to slaughter, to plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.”