During the stopover at Cumae, Aeneas’s old nurse, Caieta, dies and is buried on a nearby cape that is named in her honor (now Gaeta). The Trojans then sail north, passing the island of the enchantress Circe. At dawn on the following day, they reach the mouth of the Tiber River and dock their ships. At this crucial point of the narrative, the beginning of the second half of the epic, which will deal with the Italian phase of Aeneas’s adventures, Virgil again invokes Erato, the muse of poetry, whose help he seeks in order to tell the rest of his story.
Virgil now introduces King Latinus of Latium, who is descended from the god Saturn. Latinus and his wife, Amata, have a daughter, Lavinia, their only surviving child, who is of marriageable age and has many suitors, including Turnus, the leader of the Rutulian tribe. At the exact time that the Trojans arrive at his land, Latinus learns from his deceased father’s oracle that he should seek a foreign husband for Lavinia, to be chosen from among strangers who will intermarry with his own people, the Latins, and produce descendants who will conquer the world.
On the shore of the Tiber, meanwhile, the Trojans feast on just-harvested fruits and vegetables; they use hard wheaten cakes as platters on which to heap the food. When they have eaten the food, they then break and eat the wheaten platters: The prophecy that they would settle in the place where hunger forced them to devour their tables has been fulfilled. This prediction, incidentally, was made not by Anchises, to whom Virgil attributes it here, but by the harpy Celaeno in Book III—a discrepancy Virgil would no doubt have corrected had he lived to revise the Aeneid.
The next morning, Aeneas sends a hundred gift-bearing men as envoys to Latinus, hoping to win his favor. He then begins laying out plans for his new city. Latinus warmly receives the envoys, for he believes that the Trojans must be the strangers mentioned in the oracle’s prophecy. Offering Lavinia as a bride to Aeneas, whom he says he desires to meet, he sends the Trojans back to their leader with gifts of his own.
Learning about this turn of events, Juno is enraged once again. She vows to do her best to forestall the destiny that she realizes must nevertheless be fulfilled: the marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia, and the settlement of the Trojans in Latium. Bent on mischief, she enlists the help of the fury Allecto, whom she commands to foment war between the Trojans and the Latins.
Allecto goes first to Queen Amata, who favors Turnus as her future son-in-law and bitterly opposes her husband’s choice of Aeneas, and incites the queen to describe Aeneas to Latinus in the most vicious terms. Amata reminds the king that her choice, Turnus, is also a foreigner, by birth; because his ancestors are Greek, he fulfills the requirement of the oracle. Latinus, however, remains unmoved, enraging Amata to the point that she hides Lavinia.
Next, disguised as an old woman, Allecto visits Turnus and tells him that he must defend his right to marry Lavinia by attacking the Trojans. When Turnus does not take her seriously, thinking that she is merely foolish with age, Allecto then appears to him as the fury she truly is, and he responds by readying his army to fight.
Allecto now flies to the Trojans camped alongside the Tiber River and incites the unsuspecting Ascanius to wound a Latium family’s pet stag, thus driving its owners and Latium’s populace to retaliate. Hostilities begin, and soon there are casualties. Juno, satisfied by Allecto’s mischievous work, dismisses the fury. Latinus’s subjects demand battle, but Latinus is opposed to this war against Aeneas’s people and withdraws into his palace. Juno immediately takes charge, personally throwing open the twin gates of Mars’s temple, a ritual signifying war.
Virgil concludes Book VII with another appeal to the muse for inspiration and with a list of the leaders who, with their warriors, come from all over Latium to fight against the Trojans.
