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Turnus is a daredevil. If he were alive today, he might be the person who drag-races on Main Street at 3:00 A.M. to show off. He\'s incredibly competitive. He may not care that much about what he\'s fighting for, but he\'s proud of being a great warrior and he isn\'t going to let anyone get ahead of him.
Turnus isn\'t a nasty person. He doesn\'t really mean to cause as much harm as he does. Because he never really stops to think about the consequences of his actions, everything he does is incredibly destructive. That\'s why Virgil always compares him to a wild animal.
And that\'s Turnus\' great flaw. You\'ll see that Virgil is no pacifist. He thinks that war and killing can be justified. He does not criticize Aeneas for fighting for his people and their right to make a home in Italy. But Turnus is mostly fighting for himself. Turnus never considers the possibility of a reasonable compromise with the Trojans. Even after his allies want to make peace, Turnus cannot stop fighting.
But is Turnus to blame for this? Literally, the story tells you that Turnus is set on fire with lust for war by Allecto\'s blazing torch. Is this passion something that Turnus couldn\'t help? Or was it in his personality all along; and is Allecto only a symbol for why it heated up? (This is the same question we asked about Dido and Cupid.)
You might think that the second answer sounds more reasonable. We no longer believe that evil goddesses like Allecto really exist. But there is another way of thinking about whether or not Turnus is to blame. In some ways he is just defending his country from invasion by a foreign army, the Trojans. What is wrong with that? What would your reaction be if a foreign army arrived in the United States and said, \"Oh, by the way, we\'re here because the fates told us to come\"? If you think about it that way, what Turnus does is perfectly reasonable, and he\'s innocent because he has no way of knowing that Aeneas really is right about his fate. He doesn\'t know that Aeneas will win. If he could have known that in advance, of course there would have been no reason to fight. But he can\'t know that Aeneas will win until close to the end. To his credit, when Aeneas is about to kill him, he realizes that he was wrong and admits it.
You get an interesting insight into Juno when you think about Turnus this way. One of the things wrong with Juno is that she keeps fighting fate. That\'s irrational on her part because she knows what the fates have in store. But Turnus really doesn\'t know. So what is evil in Juno becomes tragic in Turnus. He\'s doing the best he can but he doesn\'t realize that he\'s on the losing end of history.
You can also compare Turnus to Dido. They are both victims of uncontrolled passion and of Aeneas and his fate. Dido\'s misfortune is that she lives in a country where Aeneas isn\'t meant to stay. Turnus\' problem is that he lives in a country where Aeneas is supposed to stay. But Dido harms only herself while Turnus kills many innocent people. And that makes a big difference. Dido is purely tragic, but it\'s hard to know exactly what to feel about Turnus.
Still another way of looking at Turnus is that he is the old-fashioned hero, the rugged individualist, who can never accept any authority other than his own. He cannot live in a peaceful, civilized state like the new order that Aeneas will start. There is no place for people like Turnus in Rome because they\'re the kind of people who start civil wars.
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