Page:Virgil (Collins).djvu/68

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THE ÆNEID.

Æneas not to throw away his life in a hopeless resistance. Troy must fall: but to Æneas, as the hope of his race, the prince of the house of Priam formally intrusts the national gods of Troy and the sacred fire of Vesta, to be carried into the new land which he shall colonise. It is a formal transfer of the kingdom and the priesthood to the younger branch—the line of Assaracus.

Æneas awoke, as he goes on to tell, to hear the war-cries of the Greeks and the clash of arms within the city. Already the storming-party had attacked and set fire to the house of Deiphobus,—to whom Helen, willing or unwilling, had been made over on the death of Paris; and therefore naturally the first point which Menelaus made for. Æneas himself is summoned by a comrade, Panthus, to come to the rescue. The first despairing words of Panthus have a pathos which has made them well known. No English idiom will express with equal brevity and point the Latin "Fuimus,"—"We have been—and are not," for this is understood.[1] "Fuimus Troes"—Mr Conington's translation gives the full sense, but at the expense of its terseness:—

"We have been Trojans—Troy has been—
She sat, but sits no more, a queen."

It was a phrase peculiarly Roman. So they used the word "Vixi"—"I have lived"—in epitaphs, to express death; though in this, as in so many cases, the

  1. ↑ The French word "feu," used of a person deceased, is probably from this Latin use of "fui."
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