Now, we must march towards Latium's king and walls. Then, he begins to exhort his rejoicing comrades - for the whole band of chieftains crowded around him in a circle - as follows: "Great things have been done (by us), my men for the future, away with all fear these are the spoils and the first fruits of a proud king, (and) here, by my efforts, is Mezentius. He plants a huge oak-tree, its branches lopped on all sides, on a mound, and decks (it) out with the shining armour stripped from the chief Mezentius (as) a trophy to you, great God of War (to it) he fastens crests dripping with blood, and the warrior's broken spears, and his breast-plate battered and pierced in twelve places, and he binds his bronze shield to his left (hand) and hangs his ivory-hilted sword from his neck. that of Pallas), Aeneas, as the victor, began to pay his vows to the gods, as soon as the Morning Star rose. Meanwhile, Dawn rose and left the Ocean: although his sorrows urge (him) to give time to the burial of his comrades, and his mind is disturbed by the death ( i.e. Furthermore, the host of small details that he inserts - for instance, the information that Camilla's name was a variant of her mother's name, Casmilla - adds a degree of verisimilitude to the narrative that is almost irresistible in its appeal to the reader. As in the case of the other books in the second half of this great poetic work, one can well imagine just how fascinating the details of the story Virgil has to tell must have been for his Roman audience, who will not, of course, have been able to identify easily with one side or the other in what would to them have felt effectively like a civil war. Throughout the book Virgil uses both prosodic and alliterative techniques to illustrate and bring to life the passages of his narrative. The book describes the gruesome deaths of many warriors on both sides of the struggle between the Latins and Rutulians on the one hand and the Trojan exiles, and their Arcadian and Etruscan allies on the other and Virgil uses Homer's 'Iliad' as a treasury for parallel descriptions of martial action. Much of the book deals with the upbringing, deeds and death of Camilla, whose Amazonian aristeia makes her a much more sympathetic personality than the violent and bullying Turnus, her ally, and the cunning and cowardly Arruns, who successfully plots her downfall.
The sorrow and guilt felt by Aeneas at the death of Pallas, and the lamentations of his father Evander are expressed in verses which feature Virgil's ability to engender a very moving sense of pathos, and these tones of pathos reappear in Aeneas' outburst against the horrors of war, and when Latinus proposes generous terms to settle the dispute with the Trojans, and also at the end of the book when the warrior-maid Camilla dies.
Although Book XI is probably one of the least read of the twelve books of the "Aeneid", it is full of examples of the high quality of Virgil's hexameter verse, to which Sabidius has paid tribute previously in the introductions to his translations of other works by the poet on this blogspot.