Arrival in Italy; the broken peace

The fleet rounds the Italian coast and reaches the mouth of the Tiber. Aeneas leads the men ashore. They eat their first meal on Italian soil, laying out the food on flat cakes of bread for plates; when they finish the food they begin eating the bread, and Ascanius cries out, "Look — we are eating our tables." Aeneas remembers the harpy curse from Book 3. They have arrived. He sends an embassy to the local king. Latinus rules over the Latins and the surrounding peoples; he is old and good and at peace. He has heard the oracles — his daughter Lavinia must marry a foreigner — and he greets the Trojan envoys joyfully. He offers Aeneas his daughter and his alliance.

But Lavinia is already promised. Turnus, the young prince of the neighboring Rutulians, has been the favored suitor for years; the queen Amata in particular wants the marriage. Juno, watching from above, sees an opening. She cannot stop fate, but she can drag the founding through every kind of suffering before it is complete. She summons up the fury Allecto from the deepest underworld and sends her into Italy to break the peace. Allecto is one of the most terrifying figures in the poem — snakes for hair, torches in her hands, all anger.

She works. She poisons Amata first, who runs raving with the women of Italy into the woods, hiding her daughter. She poisons Turnus, who wakes raging and rallies his men for war. She prods a young Trojan hunter — Ascanius, on his first hunt — into shooting a domesticated stag, the favorite of the local shepherds; the shepherds rise to avenge it. Within days the countryside is at war. Latinus, helpless, withdraws into his palace and refuses to take part. The book ends with Virgil's grand catalogue of the Italian peoples gathering — Mezentius the brutal Etruscan exile; Camilla, the warrior maiden of the Volsci, swift as wind; Turnus at their head, in his polished helmet, with a Chimera crest spitting flame.