Who He Is
Pallas is the son of Evander, king of the Arcadians, a youth too young for war and eager for it. He runs with a spear toward the ships of Aeneas before knowing who they are, because he does not want his father's rite interrupted, and then departs as an ally and apprentice of the Trojan hero. He wants what his age has not yet given him: the name of a warrior. His role in the poem is that of the victim who changes the course of history: his death transforms Aeneas and supplies the object, the baldric, that decides the end of the poem.
Trajectory
In Book VIII Pallas appears in the grove where his father celebrates Hercules, and it is he who confronts the newcomers, spear in hand, and asks who they are. Aeneas answers with an olive branch. When Evander seals the alliance, he hands over his son with two hundred Arcadian horsemen, and another two hundred in the youth's name, so that he learns the craft beside those who know it, and the father's farewell, as he can hardly bear to let him go, already leaves the reader uneasy.
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 Pallas sails beside Aeneas asking about the stars. On landing, the Arcadians, on foot and on bad ground, begin to flee, and he shames them: there is no god against them, they are men against men, and behind them there is only the sea. He advances and kills. Turnus sees him and claims the duel for himself alone, wanting the boy's father to watch. Pallas knows he has less strength, prays to Hercules, who was a guest of Evander, and goes to the duel anyway: turning back would contradict the speech with which he held his men. Hercules weeps, and Jupiter consoles him, saying that each has his day.
Per patris hospitium, et mensas quas advena adisti, / Te precor, Alcide, coeptis ingentibus adsis; / Cernat semineci sibi me rapere arma cruenta, / Victoremque ferant morientia lumina Turni, by my father's hospitality and by the tables where you came as a stranger, I beg you, Alcides, to be present at this great undertaking; let Turnus, half dead, see me snatch his bloody arms, and let his dying eyes take me for the victor.
Pallas grazes Turnus, and Turnus runs him through with his spear. He tramples the body, sends it back to Evander with the message that Aeneas's hospitality will not come cheap, and tears off the baldric, on which is engraved the massacre of the husbands by the daughters of Danaus. The narrator breaks off the scene to say that Turnus will one day hate this spoil, and that is the promise the poem fulfills in its last book.
rapiens immania pondera baltei, / Impressumque nefas: una sub nocte jugali / Caesa manus juvenum foede thalamique cruenti, snatching the huge weight of the baldric and the crime engraved upon it: a band of young men slaughtered, horribly, in a single bridal night, and the marriage beds full of blood.
Pallas's death transforms Aeneas: he refuses the ransom of Magus, invoking the boy, and sets aside eight young men alive for his pyre.
Argenti atque auri memoras quae multa talenta, / Gnatis parce tuis: belli commercia Turnus / Sustulit ista prior, jam tum Pallante perempto. / Hoc patris Anchisae Manes, hoc sentit Iulus, the silver and gold you mention in so many talents, keep for your sons: Turnus was the first to abolish those dealings of war, already when he killed Pallas. This the shades of my father Anchises feel, and Iulus too.
In Book XI Aeneas speaks beside the body, covers it with one of the cloaks that Dido had woven for him, and bids farewell in words of one who feels indebted for the promise made to Evander.
Salve aeternum mihi, maxime Palla, / Aeternumque vale, hail forever to me, greatest Pallas, and farewell forever.
In Book XII Pallas returns as a name: on seeing the baldric on Turnus's shoulder, Aeneas names him twice and assigns him the final blow.
Tune hinc spoliis indute meorum / Eripiare mihi? Pallas te hoc vulnere, Pallas / Immolat et poenam scelerato ex sanguine sumit, you, dressed in the spoils of my people, will escape me from here? Pallas, Pallas, sacrifices you with this wound and exacts the penalty from your criminal blood.
Themes Embodied
Pallas embodies War, through the death of a youth who asked to fight; Duty, through the pact of hospitality that his father takes on when he hands him over; and Fate and Free Will, through Jupiter's speech that places him beside Turnus and Sarpedon as cases of a marked day. Through him the poem shows that the founding of Rome demands new lives, and that the reckoning turns back against those who took them.
Pallas and Lausus, the son of Mezentius, die young: Pallas seeking the glory of the duel with Turnus, Lausus protecting his wounded father. Aeneas recognizes Lausus's piety when he kills him and feels pity for him, and he flares in fury at the sight of Pallas's baldric. The two deaths push the two fathers toward the end.
Relationships
- Evander: the father who hands him to Aeneas and later demands the killer's death.
- Aeneas: the ally into whose care he was given, and whose anger his death awakens.
- Turnus: the killer and, for a short time, owner of the baldric.
- Mezentius: the paternal mirror, because his son Lausus also dies young, out of filial piety.