save him. Troilus wears a helmet, but it is pushed up to reveal a beautiful young face. This is the only such depiction of Troilus' death in early figurative art. However, this version of Troilus as a youth defeated in battle appears also in written sources. Virgil and other Latin sources This version of the story appears in Virgil's Aeneid, in a passage describing a series of paintings decorating the walls of a temple of Juno. The painting immediately next to the one depicting Troilus shows the death of Rhesus, another character killed because of prophecies linked to the fall of Troy. Other pictures are similarly calamitous. In a description whose pathos is heightened by the fact that it is seen through a compatriot's eyes, Troilus is infelix puer ("unlucky boy") who has met Achilles in "unequal" combat. Troilus' horses flee while he, still holding their reins, hangs from the chariot, his head and hair trailing behind while the backward-pointing spear scribbles in the dust. (The First Vatican Mythographer elaborates on this story, explaining that Troilus's body is dragged right to the walls of Troy.) In his commentary on the Aeneid, Servius considers this story as a deliberate departure from the "true" story, bowdlerized to make it more suitable for an epic poem. He interprets it as showing Troilus overpowered in a straight fight. Gantz, however, argues that this might be a variation of the ambush story. For him, Troilus is unarmed because he went out not expecting combat and the backward pointing spear was what Troilus was using as a goad in a manner similar to characters elsewhere in the Aeneid. Sommerstein, on the other hand believes that the spear is Achilles' that has struck Troilus in the back. The youth is alive but mortally wounded as he is being dragged towards Troy. An issue here is the ambiguity of the word congressus ("met"). It often refers to meeting in a conventional combat but can have reference to other types of meetings too. A similar ambiguity appears in Seneca and in Ausonius' 19th epitaph, narrated by Troilus himself. The dead prince tells how he has been dragged by his horses after falling in unequal battle with Achilles. A reference in the epitaph comparing Troilus' death to Hector's suggests that Troilus dies later than in the traditional narrative, something that, according to Boitani, also happens in Virgil. Greek writers in