CHAPTER XII.
THE DEATH OF CAMILLA.
Æneas's first care, after raising a trophy crowned with the arms of the slain Mezentius, is to send home to Evander the body of his son. A picked detachment escort it to Laurentum with all honour, wrapped in robes of gold—embroidered robes, wrought by the hands of the unfortunate Dido. The youth's charger, Æthon, is led behind the bier, and his lance and helm are also borne in the procession; a custom which we have borrowed from the Romans, and retain to this day in our military funerals. Æthon weeps copious tears for his dead master; an incident not so entirely due to a poet's imagination as it may seem, since the historian Suetonius tells us that some favourite horses of Julius Cæsar showed the same tokens of grief, and refused their food, just before his death. Another feature in the obsequies of Pallas is happily obsolete; the prisoners whom Æneas had taken alive with this express object follow behind the corpse, to be sacrificed at the funeral pile. There was nothing horrible to the polished courtiers of Augustus in such a thought. Even
