Aeneas and Turnus

The war in Latium begins with a goddess who cannot accept defeat. In Book 7 of the Aeneid, Juno sees the Trojan fleet safe in the Tiber and admits she cannot stop Aeneas from taking the Latin throne, because fate has given him Lavinia. She will delay him instead. "Let sire and son buy with their people's blood this marriage-bond," she says, and she summons the Fury Allecto from hell.

Allecto goes first to Queen Amata, the wife of King Latinus. She throws a snake from her hair into the queen's breast. Amata pleads with her husband to keep Lavinia for her kinsman Turnus, then runs raving through the woods with the women of Latium. Allecto next flies to Ardea, where Turnus lies asleep. She takes the shape of an old priestess of Juno and tells him the Trojans are stealing his bride. Turnus laughs at her. Allecto drops the disguise and throws a burning torch into his chest. He wakes sweating and screaming for arms.

The first blood is drawn by accident. Allecto sets the hunting dogs of Ascanius on a tame stag that belongs to the herdsman Tyrrhus and his daughter Silvia. Ascanius shoots the stag, the herdsmen answer with clubs, and the first men die. Allecto sounds a horn from a barn roof and both sides run to arms.

Latinus tries to hold the peace and cannot. Virgil says he refused to open the Gates of War, the ritual that begins a Roman war, and withdrew into seclusion. Juno came down herself and swung the gates open. Turnus then raised the war cry from Laurentum and sent messengers to seek help from the Greek hero Diomedes. Aeneas, after the river god Tiberinus appeared to him in a dream, went to the Arcadian king Evander. There Evander's son Pallas met the strangers with a spear in his hand, took Aeneas by the hand and led him to his father's hall.

Pallas dies in Book 10. He fights on Aeneas's side and meets Turnus in the open field. Before the fight he prays to Hercules for help. Virgil says Hercules wept, and Jupiter told him that each man has his day, and that Turnus was near his own. Pallas's spear glances off Turnus. Turnus's spear goes through Pallas's shield and corselet into his heart.

Turnus stands over the body and takes Pallas's sword-belt, which shows a scene of murdered bridegrooms in gold. Virgil stops the story to say that the human heart does not know its fate. When the news reaches Aeneas, he cuts through the enemy line, and the poem says his sword was heading for Turnus. He takes eight captives alive to sacrifice on Pallas's pyre. To a man begging for his life he answers that such bargains ended "with Turnus, when fair Pallas fell."

Book 11 opens with Aeneas beside Pallas's body. He grieves that he must send the boy home to Evander dead, and he sends a guard of a thousand men with the bier. Turnus, meanwhile, answers those in Latinus's council who want peace by offering to fight Aeneas alone. The Volscian warrior Camilla then vows to meet the Trojan cavalry herself. Her death brings Turnus out of his ambush in the hills.

In Book 12 both leaders swear the terms. Aeneas promises that if Turnus wins, the Trojans will leave for Evander's city. If he wins, Latinus keeps his throne and the two peoples share their gods. The treaty does not last. Turnus's sister, the nymph Juturna, disguises herself as a Rutulian officer and stirs the army to break it, and a stray arrow wounds Aeneas as he calls for calm. Turnus rides out and slaughters the Trojan line while Aeneas is carried wounded to camp.

Aeneas returns and turns on the city itself. Virgil says his goddess-mother, Venus, put the plan in his mind. Amata, believing Turnus dead, hangs herself.

The duel comes only after the gods have finished their argument. Jupiter tells Juno the day has come. She has done all she could against the Trojans on land and sea, and he will allow no more. Juno gives way on one condition: the Latins must keep their name and speech, and Troy's name must die. Jupiter grants it, and promises that the mixed people will surpass all other men. He then sends a Fury in the shape of a small night bird to terrify Turnus, and Juturna, seeing it, abandons her brother.

The fight itself is short. Turnus's sword shatters on Aeneas's divine armour, because in his haste he had grabbed the blade of his charioteer Metiscus instead of his father's sword. Vulcan made that armour, and Virgil says its shield showed the wolf and her twins, then Rome's walls and the seizure of the Sabine women (Aeneid 8.626-670). He runs, and Aeneas chases him despite his wound. Turnus grabs a huge boundary stone and hurls it, but his strength fails and it falls short. Aeneas's spear goes through his shield and pierces his thigh. Turnus falls to one knee and asks for mercy for his father Daunus's sake. Virgil's last lines follow.