Who He Is
Evander is the old king of the Arcadians, who lives, poor and at peace with the gods, on the hill where Rome will one day rise. He was driven out of his homeland, Arcadia, and founded there a small town of huts called Pallanteum, aided by his mother, the nymph Carmenta, and by the god Apollo. When Aeneas reaches Latium and seeks allies, Evander welcomes him, gives him horsemen, and hands over his son, Pallas, so that he may learn war. What he wants is little and is everything: to end his old age in safety, with his son alive beside him. His role in the poem is double: he shows Aeneas, and the reader, the place where Rome will be born, and he pays, with the death of Pallas, the price of the alliance he himself proposed.
Trajectory
In Book VIII, Evander appears celebrating Hercules in a grove before the city, with his son and the young Arcadians. He recognizes in Aeneas the face and voice of Anchises, whom he knew when young, and accepts the alliance. To explain the rite he interrupted, he tells how Hercules killed Cacus, the monster that stole cattle and lived in a cave on the Aventine, and the story serves as a model: a guest from abroad arrives, frees the place from a scourge, receives worship, and moves on. Then he leads Aeneas through the future Rome, which he shows still in brush and stone, and in the hut he asks the guest to scorn riches, as the god who entered there did.
Haec, inquit, limina victor / Alcides subiit: haec illum regia cepit. / Aude, hospes, contemnere opes, et te quoque dignum / Finge deo, rebusque veni non asper egenis, these thresholds the victor, grandson of Alcaeus, crossed; this humble palace received him. Dare, guest, to scorn riches, make yourself worthy of the god as well, and come without harshness to a poor house.
The next morning Evander says his own forces are small and points to another source of help: the Etruscans of Agylla, who drove out King Mezentius, the tyrant who killed by tying the dead to the living. He declines the command the Etruscan chief offers him, on account of his age, and wants Aeneas as leader. At the farewell, he hands over Pallas and confesses that, if he still had the strength he had at Praeneste, he would not let his son leave, and he falls faint.
Non ego nunc dulci amplexu divellerer usquam, / Nate, tuo; neque finitimo Mezentius unquam / Huic capiti insultans, tot ferro saeva dedisset / Funera, tam multis viduasset civibus urbem, I would not now be torn from your sweet embrace, son; nor would Mezentius, mocking this neighboring head, ever have dealt so many cruel deaths by the sword, nor left the city widowed of so many citizens.
In Book X Evander does not appear on stage, but he is the addressee of everything. Turnus kills Pallas, sends the body back to the father, and says that Aeneas's hospitality will not come cheap: the poem makes the old man a target, because wounding the son is wounding the father and, by extension, the host.
Arcades, haec, inquit, memores mea dicta referte / Evandro; qualem meruit, Pallanta remitto; / Quisquis honos tumuli, quidquid solamen humandi est, / Largior: haud illi stabunt Aeneia parvo / Hospitia, Arcadians, remember and carry these words back to Evander: I return Pallas to him as he deserved; whatever honor of a tomb, whatever consolation of burial there is, I grant freely; but Aeneas's hospitality will not come cheap to him.
In Book XI the body of Pallas reaches Pallanteum, and Evander falls over it. He does not blame the Trojans or the pact of hospitality: he says the death of his son was the lot that his old age owed him. The reckoning he demands from Aeneas is personal, and the only reason left for him to live is to know that Turnus will be killed.
Quod vitam moror invisam, Pallante perempto, / Dextera causa tua est, Turnum gnatoque patrique / Quam debere vides: meritis vacat hic tibi solus / Fortunaeque locus, that I still linger in a hated life, Pallas being slain, is your hand's doing: you see that it owes Turnus to son and to father; this place alone remains for your merits and your fortune.
In Book XII he does not speak, but his request decides the last verse of the poem: when Aeneas, about to spare Turnus, sees Pallas's baldric on the enemy's shoulder, it is Pallas, and behind him the father, who receives the blow as a sacrifice.
Themes Embodied
Evander is the domestic face of Duty: the duty of hospitality, which makes him open his house and his son to a foreigner, and the duty of mourning, which makes him demand the death of the killer. He also carries Home, Exile, and Return, because he is another exile who made a deserted hill his homeland, and War, because war passes through him as loss, without glory.
The poem gives Evander a role similar to that of Priam in the Iliad: the old man who outlives his son and makes his request to the warrior who can grant it. Priam asks Achilles for Hector's body, and Evander asks Aeneas for the death of Turnus. The difference is that Priam begs his own enemy, while Evander demands it from the ally he himself chose and to whom he entrusted the boy.
Relationships
- Pallas: the son he hands over to Aeneas and does not get back alive.
- Aeneas: the host and ally to whom he entrusts the boy, and from whom he later demands Turnus.
- Turnus: the killer of Pallas, who sends the body to the father and leaves him a message.
- Mezentius: the Etruscan tyrant whose cruelties Evander recounts to Aeneas, and whose proximity he had already suffered.
- Anchises: the young friend he sees again in Aeneas's face.