Hercules and Cacus: The Battle and the Whole-Narrative Answer
Cacus had already tried cunning once. He dragged Hercules’ stolen cattle backwards into his cave by their tails, so any tracks pointed the wrong way, and hid the herd inside a den that was, in Virgil’s words, solis inaccessam radiis — ‘inaccessible to the rays of the sun’. The trick nearly worked, until one captured cow lowed from deep in the cave and gave the game away. This lesson picks up the story where trickery runs out and force takes over: the battle itself, how Virgil’s verse shapes it, how that verse compares with the alternative prose narrative by Livy, and how to build an evaluative answer that ranges across the whole story.
The fight has two stages. First, with no escape left, Cacus breathes out a wall of smoke and fire to blind Hercules and hide himself in the darkness. When that fails, Hercules leaps through the flames and strangles the monster with his bare hands, dragging the corpse out into daylight.
The Battle in Virgil’s Verse
Cacus’s first weapon is not a sword but smoke. Trapped inside his own cave, he evomit involvitque domum caligine caeca — ‘vomits out [smoke] and wraps the house in blinding fog’ — turning the fight into a battle over sight itself, since Hercules can no longer see his target. Just before the final fight, Virgil compares the cave, ripped open to the daylight, to the underworld itself being unbarred, with the spirits of the dead panicking as light is forced on them — a comparison developed over several lines, described as an extended simile, that makes Cacus’s den feel like a pocket of the world of the dead.
Smoke does not save Cacus for long. Hercules refuses to be driven back: non tulit Alcides animis — ‘he could not bear it, in his fury’ — and praecipiti iecit saltu — ‘he threw himself in a headlong leap’ — straight through the fire. Once inside, he finishes the fight with his bare hands: corripit in nodum complexus et angit inhaerens — ‘he catches him up, winding his arms round him in a knot, and clings on, strangling him’. The violence is described in close, physical detail — Cacus’s eyes are forced from his head and his throat is drained of blood — which makes the kill feel earned rather than easy.
Virgil packs the passage with sound effects that do more than decorate the story. Words describing darkness and fire are placed side by side without any connecting word — an example of asyndeton — which speeds the description up and mirrors the speed of the fight itself. Repeated harsh consonant sounds across neighbouring words (alliteration) reinforce the violence of the strangling.
Watch the grammar carefully too. In foribus domus atra revulsis — ‘with the doors torn off, the dark house [stood open]’ — revulsis is a perfect passive participle. It shows the doors were already torn off before the house was revealed, not while it was happening. Be careful not to read a perfect passive participle as if it described an ongoing or present action: it tells you the action was already complete before the time of the main verb.
When a question asks you to analyse the effect of Virgil’s language, naming a device is not enough. Quote the Latin, give a short translation, and then explain what that specific choice of words does to the reader.
Prose or Verse: A Choice of Two Narratives
The narratives paper offers a choice between one narrative written in prose and one written in verse. Virgil’s Hercules and Cacus is the verse option, built from a fixed rhythm called the dactylic hexameter, which varies pace across a line to suit the mood — more short syllables for speed, more long syllables for weight or solemnity. Rhythm is only ever an examinable feature of the verse narrative: a prose text such as Livy’s has no fixed metre to analyse.
Livy’s prose narrative works differently. Describing the first sight of the Alps, he piles up detail inside one long sentence: montium altitudo nivesque caelo prope immixtae — ‘the height of the mountains, and the snows almost merging with the sky’ — followed by homines intonsi et inculti — ‘the men unshaven and unkempt’. The details arrive one after another with no connecting words, building a cumulative, almost overwhelming impression rather than a single striking image.
Virgil’s verse favours compression and figurative language: a single extended simile can do the work of several sentences of description, and direct speech — including moments of apostrophe, where a god or hero is addressed directly as if present — brings scenes to life without narration.
Livy’s prose favours accumulation and authorial comment: long, carefully balanced sentences build up evidence point by point, and the historian sometimes steps in directly to tell the reader what to think, rather than leaving everything to imagery.
Students are not asked to translate a passage in this paper. They are expected to show detailed knowledge and understanding of the story throughout, and to understand the meaning of any Latin they choose to quote.
Building the Extended Evaluative Response
At least one question on this paper asks for an extended evaluative response. This means constructing a sustained, logically organised argument that draws evidence from across the whole narrative — the Latin sections and the English linking passages together — rather than retelling a single episode in isolation.
For example, to evaluate whether the fight is the most dramatic moment in the story, you could set the battle against the build-up in the cave description, where Cacus is first shown as a half-human monster surrounded by the pale, decaying heads of his victims, and against the aftermath, where the Salii’s hymn addresses Hercules directly and lists his earlier labours. Using evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the narrative together makes an evaluative point far more convincing than relying on the battle passage alone.
A strong evaluative answer uses at least one piece of evidence from an early section of the narrative, one from the battle itself, and one from what happens afterwards.