The tone of Book 6 should be sacred because of the meetings that Aeneas has, the series of conversations that together contain everything a human being might want to say to, or need to be told by, the ghosts of his dead. But Aeneas's words to Dido, "You stabbed yourself", are too tactless even for him. She does not respond to him and retreats to her former husband Sychaeus, who "felt for her sorrow". The Greek soldiers who, famously, can give no body to their battle cries on seeing Aeneas are "squeaking" (compare Fagles' "thin wisp of a cry"). Deiphobus, Aeneas's fallen comrade, complains of Helen, who betrayed him to "her old flame" Menelaus, hoping to "kill the stink" of her infidelity. Some of these undignified words and phrases are consistent with certain arguable interpretations of the text - the squalor of Hades, the brutish bitterness of Deiphobus, for instance - but they owe their presence, ultimately, to Ruden's self-inflicted space constraints.

These slips are not the result of an endemic problem. Elsewhere she renders direct speech brilliantly - again, the battlefield is where the short and sharp style is most fitting. At the end of Book 10, in one of the poem's greatest scenes, a wounded hero returns to the fray to avenge his son. These are his words to his horse, just before:

"...Or if our strength cannot accomplish it,
You'll fall with me. Brave thing, I don't believe
You'd take your orders from a Trojan master."