Another translator operating more freely might overdo the emotion here, but all of the pathos rests in the simplicity of "I don't believe" at the end of the line (a positioning preserved from the Latin), and Mezentius's transference of his own feelings on to the horse. Here he lies dying, and speaks to Aeneas:

Gasping the sky in, gazing at the air.
"Cruel enemy - why these sneering threats of death?
Killing's no crime - I came here knowing that.
My Lausus made no pact with you to save me."

Great last words, but the whole section, the deaths of both Mezentius and his son Lausus ("... this should solace your pathetic death:/ It came from great Aeneas") and the direct speech in particular, is a triumph.

Some lines of the Aeneid are so sublime or so mysterious that the poet-translator just has to "have a go"; in these cases, Ruden surely wished for a little more room to breathe. "Even here is praise for valour,/ And tears of pity for a mortal world" is a decent rendering of a famous phrase, but it lacks something. With his extra freedom, Fagles can give us "even here, the world is a world of tears/ and the burdens of mortality touch the heart." If nothing else, Fagles has drawn special attention to an exceptional line. When Aeneas meets the ghost of his father in the underworld, he tries to hug him three times:

Three times the form slid from his useless hands,
Like weightless wind or dreams that fly away.

Ruden's version is good - "useless hands" is an original and sensitive economy - but it is doubtful whether any translation could do full justice to this heartbreaking moment. Here is H Rushton Fairclough's prose:

Thrice the form, vainly clasped, fled from his hands, even as light winds, and most like a winged dream.