The storm and the welcome at Carthage

The poem opens with its famous first line — arma virumque cano, "I sing of arms and the man" — and a question. Why is heaven so angry with one good man? The answer is Juno. She hates the Trojans because of an old judgment in which Paris chose Venus over her, and she has heard a prophecy that Trojan descendants will one day destroy her favorite city of Carthage. She goes to Aeolus, the god who keeps the winds, and orders him to wreck the Trojan fleet. The storm hits at sea. One ship goes down with all hands; the rest are scattered. Neptune, hearing the noise and furious at the trespass, rises and calms the storm with one rebuke.

Aeneas, with seven ships of his original twenty, finds an African harbor and lands. He climbs a hill alone and shoots seven deer for his hungry men. He speaks the line Dante will quote: "Perhaps one day it will give us pleasure to remember even these things." Then his mother Venus meets him in the woods disguised as a huntress, tells him whose country he is in — Carthage, the new city of the widowed queen Dido — and wraps him and his companion Achates in a cloud of mist. They walk into the half-built city and watch from inside the cloud as Dido holds court.

The cloud parts; Aeneas appears; Dido receives him with extraordinary courtesy and invites the Trojans to a banquet. Venus, fearing for her son in this Juno-favored city, has her own son Cupid take the form of Aeneas's young Ascanius and sit on Dido's lap that night. The queen, kissing what she thinks is a child, begins — against her own will — to love. The book closes with her asking Aeneas to tell the story of Troy. He does, in the next two books.