Pierre Didot the Elder's project to revive the art of fine book publishing in the years following the French Revolution provided welcome income for a number of David's students, including Girodet. Some of the greatest examples of French Neoclassical book illustration were the result of these ambitious undertakings, most notably designs for a 1798 edition of Virgil, based on drawings supplied by Girodet and François Gérard.

In this scene taken from book 2 of the Aeneid, Aeneas comforts his son, Iulus, at the loss of the young prince Pallas, who had been felled in battle. Responding to the prescribed format of the publication, Girodet reduced Virgil's cast of characters to four, standing for youth, maturity, old age, and death. Pallas's corpse is bathed in ethereal moonlight—an effect for which Girodet had a lifelong affection.

The depiction of Roman warriors in the work of David and other artists of his circle constituted more than an aesthetic preference for classical sources; it expressed a perceived affinity with the subjects in terms of both political and moral ideology. For Girodet, Virgil's epic story of the founding of the Roman republic provided a natural symbolic association with the founding of the French republic by the heroes and martyrs of the Revolution.