On the face of it, Turnus should have been a character that a mid-twelfth-century audience could have identified with and admired. Virgil's ‘ingens Turnus’ (‘mighty Turnus’, XII, 927) stands poles apart from the villains of the first phase of Old French literature, who are generally constituted as such by their status as traitors (Ganelon in the Chanson de Roland, Modret in Wace's Brut, Hoel in Ille et Galeron, numerous antagonists of the Normans in Benoît's Chronique de ducs de Normandie), cowards (Tedbalt and Esturmi in the Chanson de Guillaume), perjurers (Etioclés in the Roman de Thèbes), or outsiders whose beliefs and/or values place them firmly beyond the pale of courtly Christian society (the Saracen leaders of the early chansons de geste, plus the fils à vilain figures of Partonopeus de Blois and the Alexander romances). As a man who attempts to defend his homeland against alien incomers and his own honour against an outrageous breach of faith by his overlord, Turnus would appear to conform to the vernacular audience's conception of a hero rather than its opposite. Virgil himself calls Turnus a hero, and it is not hard to imagine the Rutulian prince portrayed in Books VII to XII of the Aeneid as the protagonist of a chanson de geste from the cycle des barons révoltés, resisting injustice and a royal volte-face after the fashion of Girart de Roussillon.