The Aeneid ends with Aeneas killing Turnus in a duel, after Turnus has asked for his life: the last line says that the Rutulian's life "flees indignant to the shades," and the poem ends there, without marriage, without the founding of a city, and without mourning.
The duel had been arranged to decide the war and the hand of Lavinia. Aeneas swears that, if he wins, he will not make the Italians obey him, wants no kingdom, and the two peoples will have equal laws. King Latinus swears by the scepter. In less than a hundred lines the pact breaks: Juturna, Turnus's sister, at Juno's command, disguises herself, rouses the shame of the Rutulians, and an omen that she herself prepared leads the augur Tolumnius to hurl the first spear. Aeneas, with his helmet removed and his hand open, is wounded by an arrow of unknown origin and is healed by Venus.
In heaven, Jupiter forbids Juno to go on, and she yields, asking that the Latins not lose their name, speech, or dress. Jupiter grants it, smiling: the Ausonians will keep their fathers' language, and the Trojans will mingle with them. On earth, Turnus, wounded in the thigh, acknowledges that he has lost, asks for his life or, failing that, for his body to be returned to his father, Daunus, and tells Aeneas that Lavinia is his.
Aeneas was going to yield. Then he sees on Turnus's shoulder the baldric of Pallas, the young ally whom Turnus killed, and he answers that it is Pallas who sacrifices him. He thus fulfills what the old Evander demanded of him in Book 11. Readers divide: some see justice, others the price of empire, the victor killing a surrendered man moved by rage and not by law. The text sustains both readings.