On the future site of Rome; the shield

Aeneas needs allies. The river-god Tiber appears to him in a dream and tells him to row upstream — there he will find a Greek exile, Evander, who has founded a small settlement and who hates the local Italians enough to join him. The omen of a white sow with thirty piglets confirms the dream. Aeneas takes a single ship up the river. He reaches Pallanteum, a small wooden town on the Palatine Hill, just as the people are sacrificing to Hercules. Evander welcomes him as a kinsman — they share an ancestor on the Trojan side — and invites him to the feast.

The next morning Evander walks Aeneas around the settlement. The walk is one of Virgil's great quiet scenes. The old king points out a rocky outcrop where the goats wander: that will be the Capitol. He shows him a swampy area below: that is where the Forum will be. He shows him the Tarpeian Rock, the Asylum, the ancient altar of Hercules. The reader, of course, knows every site he names. The future is being walked, in slow motion, on its own ground. Evander gives Aeneas his only son Pallas — young, untested, eager — to ride with the cavalry he is providing, and sends a delegation to the Etruscans, who have already revolted against the brutal Mezentius and who, by an oracle, must be led by a foreign general.

Meanwhile, on Olympus, Venus has gone to her husband Vulcan and asked him to forge new armor for their son. Vulcan agrees and goes to his volcanic forge under Mount Etna; he sets the Cyclopes to work that night. The book closes with the longest description of armor in classical literature: the shield, engraved with the future history of Rome. Romulus and Remus suckling the wolf. The rape of the Sabines. Horatius at the bridge. The battle of Actium itself, with Augustus standing on the prow of his ship. Aeneas, when the armor is delivered, lifts the shield and is shown not knowing what is on it: he marvels and admires, says Virgil, lifting on his shoulder the fame and the fates of his descendants.