Turnus attacks the camp; Nisus and Euryalus

Juno's messenger Iris brings Turnus the news: Aeneas has gone upriver. The Rutulian prince attacks at once. The Trojan camp is fortified at the mouth of the Tiber; Aeneas has left orders that they are not to come out and fight in his absence. Turnus tries to burn the fleet on the shore. The goddess Cybele intervenes — the timber of the Trojan ships was cut from her sacred mountain — and turns the ships, in front of the army, into sea-nymphs that swim out to sea. The Italians are stunned. The siege settles in for the night.

Two young Trojan friends, Nisus and Euryalus — older brother and younger, beautiful, almost the same age — propose to slip out through the Italian lines and carry word to Aeneas. The elders agree. Euryalus asks Ascanius to look after his mother if he does not return. They make it cleanly through the camp. Then they are tempted. The Italians are sleeping after a feast; Nisus begins killing them where they lie. Euryalus, fatally, takes a polished helmet from one of the dead. In the moonlit woods the helmet glints. A returning patrol sees the flash. Euryalus is caught in dense brush; Nisus turns back; the patrol's leader kills Euryalus before Nisus can save him; Nisus charges out and dies on his body. Both heads are paraded back on spears at dawn.

The assault on the camp resumes. Turnus's army storms the gates; the Trojans hold. Ascanius — the boy, fourteen — fires an arrow and brings down the Italian who has been mocking the Trojans from a tower; it is his first kill in battle. Apollo himself comes down in the disguise of an old tutor and tells him to fight no more. At one point the Trojans, against orders, open a gate to make a sally; Turnus and a few of his men slip in before they can close it. Turnus is now inside the camp, cut off from his army. He kills many men. Cornered and exhausted, he reaches the river side and jumps in fully armed; the current carries him back to his own side.