Chapter summary
Turnus raises the sign of war from the citadel of Laurentum, the Latins rise up, and Messapus, Ufens, and Mezentius recruit troops and lay waste to the fields. The Latin chiefs send Venulus to the city of Diomedes to ask for aid, with this argument: the Trojans have arrived in Latium, they bring the defeated gods, Aeneas says he is called by fate to be king, and many peoples are joining Aeneas. Aeneas, seeing all this, divides his mind among plans, like the reflection of the sun in a bronze basin.
At night, troubled by the coming war, Aeneas falls asleep on the bank of the Tiber. The river god rises among the poplars and speaks to ease his worries: this is the right place, the Penates are certain, and the anger of the gods has already yielded. As proof, a white sow with thirty piglets will lie under the holm oaks on the bank, and there will rise the city that Ascanius will found thirty years later, Alba. The god also tells him the next step: the Arcadians of Evander, who wage ceaseless war against the Latins, must be made allies, and he himself will carry Aeneas upstream. He asks Aeneas to pray to Juno and then to honor him, because he is the Tiber.
On waking, Aeneas prays to the river, chooses two biremes, and arms his companions. He sees the white sow and sacrifices her to Juno. The Tiber smooths the current and the fleet sails up. At midday they sight the walls and the few houses of future Rome, where Evander reigned in poverty.
Evander celebrates Hercules in a grove before the city, with his son Pallas and the young elite. Pallas, who does not want the rite interrupted, runs with a spear to meet the ships and asks who they are. Aeneas holds out an olive branch: they are Trojans driven out by the Latins, they seek Evander and ask for allied arms. Before the king, he says he did not fear that he was Greek and a kinsman of the Atreidae, because the oracles, their common blood (both descend from Atlas), and Evander's fame bind them to him. He came himself, as a suppliant, because those who pursue Evander, if they drive out the Trojans, will subject all Hesperia. Evander recognizes in Aeneas the face and voice of Anchises, whom he knew when young, accepts the alliance, and invites him to the feast.
Evander explains the rite: it is gratitude for a danger overcome, not superstition. In a cave of the Aventine lived Cacus, half man, son of Vulcan, who breathed fire. When Hercules passed with the oxen of Geryon, Cacus stole eight heads and dragged them by the tail into the cave, so that the tracks would seem to lead away from it. A bull lowed and betrayed him. Hercules, furious, ran to the hill; Cacus shut himself in behind a rock, and Hercules, after circling the hill three times, tore off the peak above the cave and opened it to the light. Cacus breathed out smoke to blind him, and Hercules leapt through the fire and strangled him. From this comes the Ara Maxima.
Evander leads Aeneas through future Rome and tells how he came. Saturn, expelled from Olympus, gave laws there to a rude people, and Evander, expelled from his homeland, was placed there by Fortune, by fate, by the nymph Carmenta, his mother, and by Apollo. He shows the Capitol, covered in scrub and already feared as the dwelling of a god. In the hut, he says Hercules entered there and that the guest should do the same, without disdaining poverty.
At night, Venus, alarmed by the Latins, asks her husband Vulcan for arms for her son. She had asked for nothing while Troy was falling, but now, by Jupiter's order, Aeneas is in the lands of the Rutulians. Vulcan, embraced by her, yields and replies that if she had asked before, he would have armed the Trojans. He goes down to the forge at Lipari and orders the Cyclopes to set down the thunderbolt of Jupiter, nearly finished: he needs arms for a man, with a single shield against all the Latin darts.
At dawn, Evander tells Aeneas that his forces are small, but that there is more: the Etruscan city of Agylla drove out King Mezentius, who used to bind the dead to the living. Mezentius fled to Turnus, and a haruspex forbade the Etruscans to follow an Italian chief. Evander refuses the crown that Tarchon offers him, because of his age, and wants Aeneas as leader. He gives him Pallas, to learn war, and two hundred Arcadian horsemen, plus another two hundred in Pallas's name. While Aeneas and Achates hesitate, a flash and trumpets cross the clear sky. Aeneas recognizes the sign his mother had promised and foresees Turnus's fate.
At parting, Evander laments that he no longer has the strength he had at Praeneste, prays to Jupiter to keep Pallas alive or, if fortune threatens the worst, to let him die there himself before a worse news arrives, and collapses in a faint. Near Caere, Venus appears in a secluded valley and leaves the arms under an oak, so that Aeneas will not hesitate to challenge Turnus. He admires the helmet, the sword, the cuirass, and the shield, on which Vulcan, who knows the future, engraved Italy: the she-wolf with the twins, the Sabine women, Porsenna, Manlius and the goose that warns of the Gauls, Catiline in Tartarus and Cato among the just. In the center he sees Actium, with Augustus on the stern, the senate and the gods of Rome, against Antony and the Egyptian queen, and finally Augustus's triumph, with three hundred temples and the vanquished nations in procession. Aeneas does not understand the image, but he rejoices and lifts onto his shoulder the fame and destiny of his descendants.
Analysis
The book has two foundations at different scales: that of Rome, which Evander shows in scrub and stone without knowing what he shows, and that of the hero, which Vulcan engraves on the shield. In both cases whoever speaks or carries knows less than the reader: Evander points to the Capitol as the dwelling of an uncertain god, and Aeneas carries on his shoulder a story he cannot read. Hercules enters as a double of the guest: he arrives from outside, kills the monster of the place, gains a cult, and continues his journey. Evander tells this to whoever will do the same against Turnus and Mezentius, in the structure that the Odyssey had already used with Odysseus and Polyphemus.
The shield differs from Achilles' in the Iliad, which shows scenes of life and war without names: Aeneas's names people and events, from Romulus to Actium, engraved for whoever could recognize each scene. It can be read as propaganda for Augustus, and the objection is strong, because the shield decides no battle and the hero carries it without understanding. The same ignorance gives the book its final gesture: the founder of the line carries without knowing what the line will be, and the poem leaves open whether this is humility or simply the limit of one who cannot see the future.
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