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Aeneid · Book VII

The Arrival in Latium

PassionFate and Free WillWarEmpire and ColonialismHome, Exile, and Return

Chapter summary

The Trojans bury Caieta, the nurse of Aeneas, on the coast that will take her name, and set out when the sea calms. They pass close to the coast of Circe, where the roars of men she turned into beasts can be heard, and Neptune fills the sails with wind so that no one lands there. At dawn, Aeneas sights the mouth of the Tiber and orders the fleet to enter. The narrator invokes the muse Erato and warns that the subject now is war, a greater work than the previous one.

King Latinus has ruled in peace for a long time, but he has no male heir: the only boy died young, and only his daughter, Lavinia, remains. Many seek her, and Queen Amata wants Turnus, a young man of powerful lineage, and hastens the wedding. Portents stall the marriage: bees settle on the sacred laurel of the palace, and a seer reads in this the arrival of a stranger; Lavinia's hair catches fire during a sacrifice without burning her, a sign of fame for her and of war for the people. Disturbed, Latinus consults the oracle of his father Faunus and receives the answer in a dream: he must not marry his daughter to a Latin, for foreign sons-in-law will come and carry the name of the people up to the heavens.

The Trojans eat under the trees, serving the food on flatbreads of flour, and hunger makes them bite into their own flatbreads. Ascanius, the young Iulus, jokes that now they are eating even the tables. Aeneas recognizes in this the prophecy that Anchises left him: the hunger that made them eat their tables would mark the end of the wandering. He greets the land and the Penates, and Jupiter answers with thunder. The next day, Aeneas sends a hundred ambassadors, with olive branches and gifts, to Latinus.

Ilioneus tells Latinus that the Trojans did not come by storm or by a mistake of course, but because fate and Apollo sent them to the Tiber. He asks for a piece of land and offers objects saved from Troy, among them the scepter of Priam. Latinus hardly looks at the objects, because his daughter's marriage occupies him: he concludes that Aeneas is the son-in-law Faunus spoke of, promises land, invites Aeneas to come, and sends horses to the ambassadors.

Juno returns from Argos through the air, sights the Trojan fleet and Aeneas already laying the foundations of homes, and is struck still by pain. She admits that she cannot prevent Lavinia's marriage to Aeneas, which fate guarantees, and decides to delay it and drench it in blood: she descends to earth and summons from hell the Fury Alecto, to whom she entrusts discord among kin and allies.

Alecto hurls a serpent at Amata, who was already burning with fear and anger at the arrival of the Trojans. Before the poison takes hold, Amata asks her husband whether he will give their daughter to exiles, to a foreigner who will carry her off on a ship, and she reminds him that Turnus himself descends from people of Mycenae, and so is also from outside. Latinus does not yield, and the poison takes her: she runs through the city and flees to the mountains with her daughter, on the pretext of a rite of Bacchus, and the Latin women follow her.

Alecto goes to Ardea and takes the form of Calybe, an old priestess of Juno, to urge Turnus to defend his bride and throne. Turnus laughs at her, says he already knows about the ships, and tells her to look after the temples. Alecto shows the face of a Fury and drives a torch into his chest. Turnus wakes in a sweat, asks for arms, and summons the Rutulians, who follow him for his beauty, his lineage, and his deeds.

The Fury now prepares the first combat. Ascanius's dogs, stirred up by her, chase a tame stag raised by Silvia, daughter of the king's herdsman, and Ascanius, moved by the desire for glory, wounds it with an arrow. The stag returns bleeding, Silvia calls for help, and the countrymen arrive armed with whatever they can find. The Trojans rush to Ascanius's aid, and the brawl turns into a fight with swords: Almo, the herdsman's son, and old Galaesus, who had offered to mediate the peace, die. Alecto proposes to Juno that she carry the war to the neighboring cities, but Juno answers that terror and fraud are enough and sends her away, because Jupiter would not tolerate her wandering through the sky.

The shepherds carry the bodies to Latinus, Turnus accuses the Trojans, and Amata's followers join the crowd that demands war. Latinus resists like a rock in the sea, but, without strength against the blind desire of the people, he says that fate breaks him, warns that Turnus will pay for the crime, and withdraws into his house, letting go of the reins of the kingdom. It was for the king to open the gates of War, a custom Rome still observes when the consul opens them. Latinus refuses to touch them, and it is Juno herself who comes down from heaven and pushes the leaves apart. All Ausonia arms itself.

The poet invokes the Muses and lists the chiefs who join Turnus: Mezentius, scorner of the gods, with his son Lausus; Aventinus, son of Hercules; Caeculus, founder of Praeneste; Messapus, son of Neptune; Umbro, a priest who charms serpents; Virbius, son of Hippolytus, the hero whom Diana revived and hid under that same name; and Turnus himself, with the Chimaera on his helmet. The list is closed by Camilla, queen of the Volscians, able to run over the wheat without bending it.

Analysis

Book VII marks the poem's change of model. Until here the Aeneid retells the Odyssey, with voyage, storm, and wandering; from here on it retells the Iliad, with war, armies, and a catalogue of chiefs. Virgil does not leave the change implicit: he interrupts the narration to invoke Erato and say that the work has grown. The announcement can be read as epic convention, since Homer also changes register without warning, but it serves a clear purpose, which is to measure itself openly against the Greek model.

The war of the book is born without anyone deciding it: Latinus refuses it until he gives up the throne, Amata acts seized by a serpent, Turnus is kindled by a torch, and countrymen and Trojans fight over a wounded deer. But the text also supports the opposite reading, that Alecto only lights what was already there: Amata was burning with fear of losing her daughter before the serpent arrived, Turnus already knew about the ships and was losing bride and throne, and Ascanius shoots for love of glory. Camilla closes the catalogue as an exception: the only woman, described by the lightness of her body and not by genealogy or arms. Juno's line, "if I cannot bend the gods above, I will move Acheron," is the one Sigmund Freud placed as the epigraph of The Interpretation of Dreams and repeated at the close of chapter VII, The Psychology of Dream-Processes: if conscious reason does not confess the desire, analysis stirs up the underworld.

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