Book 1
Storm and Carthage
The poem opens with its famous first line — "I sing of arms and the man" — and a question: why is heaven so angry with one good man? Juno, hating Troy, asks Aeolus to wreck the Trojan fleet. The storm sinks one ship; Neptune calms the sea, furious at the trespass. Aeneas, with seven ships left, lands on an unknown African shore. His mother Venus, in the form of a huntress, sends him under a cloak of mist to Carthage, where Queen Dido receives him with extraordinary generosity. At the welcoming feast, Venus has Cupid take the place of Ascanius and sit on Dido's lap. The queen, kissing the false child, begins to fall in love.
Book 2
The fall of Troy
Aeneas walks the reader directly into the night Homer left out. The Greeks pretend to sail away, leaving a wooden horse on the beach. The Trojans, against Laocoön's warning, drag it inside the walls; that night, Greek soldiers slip out of its belly. Aeneas wakes to the city already burning. He fights through the streets and reaches Priam's palace just as the old king is murdered at his own altar. His mother Venus reveals the gods themselves tearing the walls of Troy down. He lifts old Anchises onto his shoulders, takes young Ascanius by the hand, and leads them out through the smoke. His wife Creusa, following, is gone; her ghost appears, foretells his future kingdom in the west, and vanishes.
Book 3
The wanderings
Aeneas continues his story. The fleet sails to Thrace, where a bleeding bush — a murdered Trojan — sends them on. They consult Apollo at Delos, misread the oracle, sail to Crete, are driven out by plague. The household gods name Italy in a dream. They bear west. The harpies in the Strophades curse them to eat their own tables before they find a home. They pass the cave of the Cyclops, rescuing a Greek left behind by Odysseus. They reach Sicily — and there, before Italy, Anchises dies of old age. Aeneas breaks off the story; Dido has been listening with her whole self.
Book 4
Dido and the leaving
Dido is in love. Juno and Venus conspire to bring the lovers together. During a hunt, a divine storm scatters the party; Dido and Aeneas take shelter in a cave. The queen calls it marriage. Aeneas has lost his sense of mission. Jupiter sees and sends Mercury down with an explicit order: leave. Aeneas prepares the fleet in secret. Dido finds out. She rages, pleads, curses him. He cannot answer her grief; he can only repeat the order. The fleet sails before dawn. Dido has a great pyre built in the courtyard, climbs it, calls down a curse, and falls on the sword he left behind. The ships, already at sea, see the smoke rise from the city.
Book 5
Funeral games
The fleet, blown back to Sicily, finds itself near Anchises's tomb on the exact anniversary of his death. Aeneas calls funeral games — a boat race won by reckless cornering, a foot-race won when the leader slips in spilled blood, a boxing match between an old veteran and a young Sicilian, an arrow that catches fire in mid-air as an omen. While the men compete, the Trojan women, weary of years at sea, are roused by Juno's messenger and set fire to the ships. Most are saved by a sudden rain. Anchises appears to Aeneas in a dream and tells him to come find him in the underworld at Cumae.
Book 6
The underworld
The philosophical heart of the poem. The fleet lands at Cumae. Aeneas finds the Sibyl in her cave; she prophesies the wars he will face in Italy and agrees to lead him into the underworld to find his father. He buries his trumpeter Misenus and gathers the golden bough as a gift for Persephone. They descend at midnight. He sees the river of the unburied dead, the lovers in the Fields of Mourning where Dido walks among them and turns away from him without speaking. They reach the Elysian Fields. Anchises shows him the parade of unborn Roman souls — Romulus, Caesar, Augustus, the heroes of the Republic. The future is shown as actually present, just below.
Book 7
Arrival in Latium
The fleet reaches the mouth of the Tiber. The Trojans land and eat their meal on flat cakes — and notice they are eating their tables, fulfilling the harpy curse from Book 3. They have arrived. King Latinus, whose oracles have told him his daughter Lavinia must marry a foreigner, offers her to Aeneas. But Lavinia is already promised to Turnus, prince of the Rutulians. Juno summons up the fury Allecto from the underworld. Allecto poisons Queen Amata; she poisons Turnus; she drives a young Trojan hunter to wound a domesticated stag. Within days the peaceful kingdom is at war. The book ends with Virgil's catalogue of Italian warriors gathering.
Book 8
Evander and the shield
Aeneas, advised by the river-god Tiber in a dream, rows a single ship up the river to find allies. He reaches Pallanteum on the Palatine Hill — a Greek exile-colony ruled by King Evander, on the site that will one day be Rome. Evander walks him through what is at present a wood with cattle in it: this outcrop will be the Capitol; this is where the Forum will stand. He sends his only son Pallas, untested in war, to fight at Aeneas's side. Meanwhile Venus asks Vulcan for divine armor. The shield takes Virgil more than a hundred lines to describe — engraved with the future history of Rome, ending at Augustus's triumph at Actium.
Book 9
The night raid
Juno tells Turnus that Aeneas is away. He attacks the Trojan camp. The Trojans refuse to come out; Turnus tries to burn the fleet and the ships are transformed by the goddess Cybele into sea-nymphs that swim out to sea. The siege settles in for the night. Two young Trojan friends, Nisus and Euryalus — close as brothers — slip out to carry word to Aeneas. They make it through the Rutulian camp; they are tempted, fatally, to start killing sleeping men. Euryalus's polished helmet catches the moonlight. They are spotted and hunted down. Their bodies are paraded back at dawn. The next day Ascanius makes his first kill in battle — Apollo comes down to tell him to fight no more.
Book 10
The death of Pallas
On Olympus, Jupiter forbids the gods from any further interference. Fate will decide. Aeneas, with the Etruscan fleet, returns by sea and leaps from his ship into the surf in his new armor; the Italian line breaks. Pallas, in his first major battle, is drawn into combat with Turnus, who is older and stronger; Turnus kills him with a spear-throw. Then he commits the act that will undo him: he strips the sword-belt from the dead boy and puts it on. Aeneas, hearing, goes mad with grief. He kills Lausus, the young son of Mezentius, who has thrown himself between his father and Aeneas's spear; he is moved to pity for the body. He then kills Mezentius himself.
Book 11
Camilla's charge
Dawn after the battle. Aeneas prepares Pallas's body for the journey home. The procession is one of the great mourning scenes in classical literature — a thousand Trojan elders, the boy on a bier of woven branches, his father Evander waiting at the gates. A truce is granted; the Latin council debates peace, but Turnus refuses. The fighting resumes. Camilla, the warrior maiden of the Volsci, leads the Italian cavalry against the Trojans and kills warrior after warrior. Then a coward — Arruns, who has been stalking her — throws a single javelin from cover and hits her in the breast. She dies in the arms of her servant. The Italian line breaks.
Book 12
The final duel
Turnus, with his army broken, agrees to settle the war in single combat. The kings swear oaths. Then Juno breaks the truce through Turnus's sister Juturna, who in disguise rouses the Italians to attack. Aeneas is wounded; Venus heals him. On Olympus, Juno yields to Jupiter — her one condition is that the Trojans take the Latin name and language. The two men meet at last. Aeneas's spear hits Turnus in the thigh. Turnus falls, raises his hand, and surrenders. Aeneas hesitates. Then he sees the sword-belt of Pallas on Turnus's shoulder. He drives the spear through Turnus's chest. The poem ends in the next four lines, on a soul going down to the shadows indignant.