The shield that Vulcan forges for Aeneas bears engraved the future history of Rome, from the twins suckled by the she-wolf to the battle of Actium and the triumph of Augustus, and Aeneas carries it on his shoulder without knowing how to read the scenes.
Venus asks her husband Vulcan for the arms, and he interrupts Jupiter's thunderbolt to make a shield against all the Latin darts, with seven circles upon circles. She leaves them under an oak, in a valley near Caere. The narrator says that Vulcan, knowing the seers, engraved there "the things of Italy and the triumphs of the Romans," and the line of Ascanius from then on.
The scenes follow the history of the city. First, the she-wolf lying in a green cave, with the two boys hanging from her teats. Then the Sabine women, Porsenna, and Manlius defending the Capitol, warned by a silver goose that the Gauls are at the door. There is also Tartarus, with Catiline hanging from a crag, and apart, the just, to whom Cato gives laws. At the center is the battle of Actium: on one side Augustus, standing on the high stern, with senators, people, Penates, and flames over his temples; on the other the Egyptian queen, who summons her troops with the sistrum and does not yet see the serpents behind her. The shield ends with Augustus's triumph and the three hundred temples he consecrates.
Aeneas admires the shield and rejoices in the images, "not knowing the things," and carries on his shoulder the fame and the destinies of his descendants. The book can be read as praise of Augustus, and the objection is strong, because the shield decides no combat. It can also be read as a portrait of one who carries, without understanding, what his lineage will be.