"Do you like Aeneas?" Richard asked.
Phillips thought for a moment.
"Calling what I feel for this ancestor of the Romans 'like' would be putting it too mildly."
He flipped to a page near the back of the book.
"At the end of Book Twelve, Aeneas killed Turnus."
"Turnus had already fallen to the ground. He begged for mercy, holding out his hand and pleading for forgiveness.
Aeneas hesitated... Virgil made that very clear. He hesitated."
"But in the end, he still drove his sword down."
Phillips closed the book.
"That's the final scene of the entire epic. Virgil chose to end it there."
"No triumphant cheers, no glory of founding a city, and certainly no 'sparing the conquered.'
The final image is of a hero consumed by rage, driving his sword into the chest of a kneeling man begging for mercy."
He delivered a rather unsettling judgment in a calm voice:
"Virgil probably thought that was what people were really like."
Phillips tucked the book under his arm, picked up his teacup from the windowsill, and finished his tea.
"You've spent the whole day copying things down."
"And judging by how much you've sweated and the dust on your cuffs, you've probably been here since the library opened."
"More or less," Richard replied casually.
Phillips glanced at him.
"You're just like Aeneas in the book, rowing through a storm and struggling toward your destination."
He gave a self-deprecating smile.
"I'm more like Dido, sitting in the city, drinking tea and admiring the view, waiting to see who might drift in from the sea."
A well-born young nobleman with a bright future was comparing himself to a queen who had met her ruin through loving the wrong man.
If it had been a joke and nothing more, he wouldn't have