Amata reminds the king that her choice, Turnus, is also a foreigner, by birth because his ancestors are Greek, he fulfills the requirement of the oracle. Bent on mischief, she enlists the help of the fury Allecto, whom she commands to foment war between the Trojans and the Latins.Īllecto goes first to Queen Amata, who favors Turnus as her future son-in-law and bitterly opposes her husband's choice of Aeneas, and incites the queen to describe Aeneas to Latinus in the most vicious terms. She vows to do her best to forestall the destiny that she realizes must nevertheless be fulfilled: the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia, and the settlement of the Trojans in Latium. Learning about this turn of events, Juno is enraged once again. Offering Lavinia as a bride to Aeneas, whom he says he desires to meet, he sends the Trojans back to their leader with gifts of his own. Latinus warmly receives the envoys, for he believes that the Trojans must be the strangers mentioned in the oracle's prophecy. He then begins laying out plans for his new city. The next morning, Aeneas sends a hundred gift-bearing men as envoys to Latinus, hoping to win his favor. This prediction, incidentally, was made not by Anchises, to whom Virgil attributes it here, but by the harpy Celaeno in Book III - a discrepancy Virgil would no doubt have corrected had he lived to revise the Aeneid.
When they have eaten the food, they then break and eat the wheaten platters: The prophecy that they would settle in the place where hunger forced them to devour their tables has been fulfilled. On the shore of the Tiber, meanwhile, the Trojans feast on just-harvested fruits and vegetables they use hard wheaten cakes as platters on which to heap the food. At the exact time that the Trojans arrive at his land, Latinus learns from his deceased father's oracle that he should seek a foreign husband for Lavinia, to be chosen from among strangers who will intermarry with his own people, the Latins, and produce descendants who will conquer the world. Latinus and his wife, Amata, have a daughter, Lavinia, their only surviving child, who is of marriageable age and has many suitors, including Turnus, the leader of the Rutulian tribe. Virgil now introduces King Latinus of Latium, who is descended from the god Saturn. At this crucial point of the narrative, the beginning of the second half of the epic, which will deal with the Italian phase of Aeneas's adventures, Virgil again invokes Erato, the muse of poetry, whose help he seeks in order to tell the rest of his story.
At dawn on the following day, they reach the mouth of the Tiber River and dock their ships. The Trojans then sail north, passing the island of the enchantress Circe. During the stopover at Cumae, Aeneas's old nurse, Caieta, dies and is buried on a nearby cape that is named in her honor (now Gaeta).
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