Discussion Questions

Jupiter promises Venus that Juno herself will change her mind and come to favor the Romans. Why does the poem make the founder of Rome begin as a shipwrecked man who envies the dead of Troy, if his destiny is already guaranteed?

Dido welcomes the Trojans saying she has learned to help the unfortunate because she knows evil, but Mercury has already softened the Carthaginians and Cupid is going to inflame her at Venus's command. Is Dido's welcome her own gesture or the plan of the gods?

Aeneas recognizes his mother only when she is leaving, and he complains of being deceived by false shapes. What changes in the reading of the poem when the first disguise belongs to the goddess who protects him most?

Cassandra gets two lines and no speech, while Sinon speaks for more than a hundred lines and is believed. Why does the poem give the long voice to the one who deceives and almost none to the one who is right?

Venus tells Aeneas that the fault is not Helen's or Paris's, but the gods', and shows him Neptune, Juno and Pallas overturning Troy. Does this revelation free Aeneas from fury, free the city from blame, or remove any human responsible from the war?

In telling Dido, Aeneas also recounts the fury with which he took up arms, the shield exchanged and the wife lost on the way. Why does someone who has lost everything choose to include his own mistakes in the account?

The Penates correct Apollo's oracle in a dream, but only after the plague has fallen on the new city of Crete. Why does the poem let Anchises' mistake cost a city and an epidemic before correcting it?

Helenus says the Parcae and Juno prevent him from revealing the rest, and at the same time orders Aeneas to pray to Juno before all else. What does it mean for the hero to depend on a prophet whose speech is limited by the goddess who pursues him?

Aeneas avoids Scylla and Charybdis following Helenus's advice, and takes in Achaemenides, a Greek, instead of leaving him to the Cyclopes. What do these two choices say about the kind of hero that Virgil opposes to Homer's hero?

Dido no longer asks for marriage, nor that Aeneas give up Italy; she asks only for a time of easier sea, and the narrator says that a god stops up his ears. What changes in the reading of the refusal if it comes from the god and not from him?

Aeneas says he does not follow Italy by his own will, and Dido reads in this an excuse. What does the scene sustain: contained pain, justified flight, or both?

Juno set up the cave, and in the end it is she who sends Iris to free Dido's soul. Does the death she helped cause call for this gesture of pity, or does the gesture hold Juno herself to account?

Neptune promises Venus that only one will perish so that all may arrive, and Sleep chooses Palinurus, who distrusted the calm sea and resisted, speaking and holding fast to the helm. What does the poem say about a divine protection that exacts one life without warning the victim?

Between the game on horseback and the cry before the burning ships, Ascanius goes from a boy who receives a message to a boy who gives orders to adults. Does this show the maturing of his character, or the poem's haste in preparing him for his role in Latium?

The Trojan women burn the ships because they want a city after seven years at sea, and Juno uses that true desire against Aeneas. Was their desire wrong, or does the poem grant it when Aeneas founds Acesta with those who stay?

The Sibyl says the bough yields to whom the fates call and to no one else, but Aeneas breaks it off while it hesitates. Does the gesture show that Aeneas is the chosen one, or that the Sibyl's rule had a slack she never declared?

Anchises shows Aeneas the glory of Rome, but he includes in the parade the civil war between Caesar and Pompey and the death of the young Marcellus. Why does Virgil place warning and grief inside a vision meant to kindle the hero's spirit, and what does this say about how the poem judges empire?

Aeneas leaves the world of the dead by the ivory gate, the one of false dreams. If what he saw was a dream, what remains of the mission Anchises gave him? If it was not, why did the poet choose that gate?

Alecto kindles in Amata, Turnus, and Ascanius feelings that they already had. How much of the war of Book VII is human decision and how much is Juno's work, if the poem shows both sides?

Latinus applies to Aeneas, without proof, the oracle that named no one, and then withdraws instead of preventing the war. What kind of king does the book show: one who reads signs well, or one who cannot act on them?

Camilla closes the catalogue of chiefs, all defined by lineage and arms, with a description of movement and of what she does not do. What does the poem gain by ending the list with her?

Evander hands Pallas over to Aeneas and, at parting, asks the gods that his son live, or that he himself die before the worst news. Does he give his son out of calculation for the city, out of trust in Aeneas, or because he cannot do otherwise?

The shield places the history of Rome in the hands of someone who does not understand it, and Aeneas rejoices in the image. What does the poem gain by entrusting the future to one who cannot read it, and what does the hero lose?

Evander asks Aeneas to despise riches, and the same book ends with a Rome of three hundred temples and defeated peoples in procession. Does the poem approve the passage from the hut to empire, or does it leave that passage as an open contrast?

Nisus begins by doubting whether the impulse comes from a god or from his own desire, and he says that the fame of the deed is enough for him. In the end, the narrator promises the two a fame that lasts as long as Rome does. Was the raid a service to Aeneas or a search for glory, and does the poem decide between the two?

Ascanius promised riches to the two, and booty was customary, but it is the helmet taken from Messapus that gives Euryalus away. What weighs most in his death: the booty, the size of the slaughter, the wood and the night, or the decision to leave without saying goodbye to his mother?

Turnus is compared to a wolf before a sheepfold and, at the end, to a lion surrounded. In the middle, he enters the camp alone and does not open the gate to his own men. What does the poem show of his courage, and what can it achieve or fail to achieve without someone at his side?

Jupiter says he treats Trojans and Rutulians without distinction, but shortly after tells Hercules that Turnus has reached the end of the time given, and grants Juno only a postponement. Is Jupiter's neutrality real, or is it a way of presenting fate as if it were not his choice?

Aeneas refuses Magus's ransom, saying that Turnus ended the exchange of war by killing Pallas, and shortly after returns arms and body to Lausus. What separates, in the book, the enemy to whom Aeneas denies life from the enemy to whom he returns honor?

Lausus dies out of loyalty to his father, the same loyalty that defines Aeneas, and Aeneas kills him saying that piety deceives him. What does the poem propose about the value of this virtue when it protects neither side?

Aeneas has already accused himself of failing to keep the word he gave Evander, and Evander hands Turnus over to him as a debt owed by a father. How far is Turnus's death at the end of the poem a personal debt, and how far is it a necessity of war?

Aeneas offers peace to the living, Latinus proposes land and ships, Drances and the women of Laurentum ask for the duel, and Turnus accepts it in words. If so many paths to stop the war appear on the same day, why does none of them stop it?

The narrator gives two reasons for Camilla's pursuit of Chloreus, and the goddess who protects her avenges her in full, while Apollo grants Aruns only half of what he asks. What does the poem say in giving a warrior a biography, a fall, and a vengeance in a single book?

Why does the poem have Aeneas justify the blow in the name of Pallas, and not in the name of the treaty, of Latinus, or of Rome?

Latinus, Aeneas, and Turnus himself accept the duel to end the war, and it is Juturna, at Juno's command, who breaks the pact with the help of an omen. Who bears responsibility for what comes after?

Who gains from the agreement between Jupiter and Juno: the Trojans, who lose their name, the Latins, who keep it, or Rome, which will be born from the mixture?

Does Aeneas act out of duty or out of choice, and what does the poem gain by making its hero someone who obeys rather than decides?

Is Dido a victim of fate and of the gods, or of the decision she herself makes when she calls what she lived in the cave a marriage?

When Aeneas kills the surrendered Turnus, does the poem celebrate Roman piety or denounce the cost of empire, and is it possible that he has no choice?

Why does Virgil tell the founding of Rome as a sequence of deaths, from Creusa and Anchises to Dido, Pallas, Camilla, and Turnus, and what does that say about the idea of empire?

Do the gods decide everything in the poem, or does room remain for human choice, and where does it appear?

What future does the poem promise the defeated Latins, and does that future make up for the losses the war cost them?