Vergil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Milton Leah Whittington A ...

implicit in the idea of ransom. At the same time, by attributing his refusal of ransom to
Turnus’ killing of Pallas, Aeneas also suggests that before the death of Pallas, he would
have consented to ransoming a suppliant instead of slaughtering him outright, as would
have been consistent with the Roman practice of pardoning enemy combatants who
offered complete surrender. Indeed, this is how the fourth-century commentator Tiberius
Donatus glosses the passage:
humanitatem, inquit, poscis, quae inter partis solet aliquando praestari, sed
istam mihi tuus ille sustulit Turnus et inhumanitatem plenam morte Pallantis
docuit. 79
you are asking for kind treatment, which sometimes exists between factions,
but your Turnus took that away from me and with the death of Pallas he
prescribed all-out cruelty.
Coffee wants to see Aeneas’ rejection of the notion of strict commodity exchange
implied by ransom as a moral improvement on the Homeric model, in which captives
were routinely sold into slavery or ransomed for money, but a number of factors point to
a different view of what is at stake in Aeneas’ rejection of Magus. Aeneas’ response
clings to another Homeric precedent: Book 21 of the Iliad, where, in responding to
Lycaon’s request for mercy, Achilles recalls a time before the death of Patroclus when it
was his practice to ransom his captives rather than killing them in cold blood. For
79 Tiberius Claudius Donatus, Interpretationes Vergilianae, ed. Heinrich Georgii
(Stuttgart: Teubner, 1969), 10.2.
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