Evander- Roman DemigodDemigod"King of Pallanteum"

The Arcadian Exile

Evander's mother was Carmenta, a nymph with the gift of prophecy, and his father was Mercury. In Dionysius of Halicarnassus's account, Evander left Arcadia at Carmenta's urging, sixty years before the Trojan War. He sailed with a small band of Arcadians, settled on a hill above the Tiber, and called the place Pallanteum after his home in the Peloponnese.

The hill was the Palatine. Evander's people raised thatched huts and grazed cattle where emperors would later build their palaces. Carmenta herself earned a gate in the city walls, the Porta Carmentalis, and a January festival, the Carmentalia. Livy records that Evander brought the Greek alphabet and new religious rites to the Italic peoples already living in the region, and that his authority rested more on the wonder these things inspired than on any force of arms.

Hercules and the Ara Maxima

Hercules came to Pallanteum driving the cattle he had taken from Geryon in the far west. While the herd grazed near the Tiber, a fire-breathing creature named Cacus dragged several of the finest animals backward into his cave on the Aventine, so the hoofprints would point the wrong way. The stolen cattle bellowed from inside the rock. Hercules heard them, tore the cave open, and killed Cacus.

Evander and his people found Hercules standing over the body. Carmenta had foretold that a son of Jupiter would come to this place, and Evander recognized the prophecy fulfilled. He slaughtered cattle, set a feast, and established an altar on the spot: the Ara Maxima in the Forum Boarium. The rites he prescribed outlasted every kingdom the hill would know. Women were barred from the altar, and merchants offered tithes of their profits there. Ovid records the founding in the Fasti; Virgil tells it through Evander's own voice in the eighth book of the Aeneid.

Pallas

By the time Aeneas sailed up the Tiber, Evander was old. The river god Tiberinus had told Aeneas to seek the Arcadian's help against Turnus, and Aeneas found Evander and his people mid-sacrifice at the Ara Maxima, still honoring Hercules on the anniversary of Cacus's death.

Evander welcomed him. He had once met Anchises and Priam, and he saw in the Trojans an old kinship. He walked Aeneas through Pallanteum, pointing out the Capitoline Hill where a god's presence already stirred the brush, the Tarpeian Rock, the Lupercal cave where the she-wolf would one day nurse Romulus. Virgil gives the scene its weight: cattle lowing in a future forum, thatch roofs on ground that would hold marble.

Evander pledged his small band of warriors to the Trojan cause. Then he gave what cost him more: his son Pallas, young and untested, placed under Aeneas's protection. Pallas rode out wearing a sword belt that would become famous. Turnus killed him in single combat and stripped that belt from his body. When Evander's grief reached Aeneas, it did not fade. In the Aeneid's final lines, Aeneas sees Pallas's belt on Turnus's shoulder and drives his sword home.