The first half of the Aeneid, with its great variety of incident, is likely to be more interesting to modern readers than the second half, with its sometimes monotonously lengthy descriptions of battle and bloodshed. However, Virgil expected that his contemporaries would regard the Trojans’s campaign in Italy as more significant than the account of Aeneas’s wanderings: It deals with nothing less than the establishment of the Trojans in Latium, site of the future Rome, and the ultimate union of the Trojan and Latin races.
The legendary Trojans, as Jupiter assures Juno at the end of the Aeneid, will be absorbed into the Latin race that existed before their arrival on Italy’s soil. Jupiter’s announcement to Juno is intended to reconcile her to the Trojans’s presence and make her hospitable toward the future Rome; it is also a way of explaining the total absence of any solid evidence—for example, traces of a language—of the Trojans’s real, historical existence.
Aeneas and his fellow warriors are, in fact, Romans in disguise. In the imagined world of the epic poem, they represent all of the virtues admired by Romans, of whom, along with the native Latins, they are supposedly the forebears. Furthermore, they are wreathed with the Homeric glory that derives from their having figured in Homer’s Iliad, in which Aeneas himself is a hero. Defeated by the Greeks in the Trojan War, the Trojans will be the victors in the war they must now wage in Italy in order to prepare the way for the establishment of Rome, a second Troy.
King Latinus, who recognizes the Trojans’s divinely ordained mission from the start, is in favor of Aeneas’s marrying his daughter, Lavinia. Virgil carefully creates the impression that the war between the Latins and the Trojans was a mistake that might have been avoided if only the moderate, wise Latinus had prevailed over the wills of Turnus and Amata, who are literally, as a result of Juno’s having enlisted the assistance of Allecto, consumed by fury. To his credit, Turnus initially rejects Allecto’s counsel, but ultimately he and the queen become the enemies of the civilizing mission represented by Aeneas and endorsed by Latinus.
Virgil leaves little doubt that Aeneas and the Trojans are not to blame for the upcoming, all-out war. On the first full day after his arrival in Latinus’s kingdom, Aeneas sends legates bearing gifts to Latinus to ask that the Trojans be allowed peacefully to found a settlement. Always the good ruler, Aeneas begins immediately to outline this hoped-for city. Presented to Latinus, the legates ask only for “A modest settlement of the gods of home, / A strip of coast that will bring harm to no one, / Air and water, open and free to all.” Continually, Virgil emphasizes the peaceful nature of the Trojans, who, as Latinus is well aware, are fated to succeed no matter what the obstacles.
Aeneas’s outlining where the future city’s walls will be erected furthers the theme of order, which is so important in the epic poem. After their chaotic voyaging, the Trojans want nothing more than to settle down quietly. Immediately following the passage describing Aeneas’s planning the city, Virgil describes the activities of Latinus’s household, activities that symbolize an ordered society, which Aeneas wants for himself and his people. However, when Latinus effectively abdicates his position as king, the Latin society becomes disordered and therefore vulnerable. When Turnus vows to march against Latinus, who has refused to declare war against the Trojans, the king’s rule is totally undermined; his own subjects look to Turnus for leadership.
Turnus’s militant fury in the second half of the Aeneid is the counterpart to Dido’s erotic fury in the first half. Together, these two characters are opposed in spirit to the dutiful, self-sacrificing Aeneas, although Turnus and Aeneas are both described as physically superior to other warriors. Splendid individualists who follow their own wills to the point of excess, the Rutulian warrior and the Carthaginian queen embody ways of feeling and acting that prevail in the Homeric epics. The Aeneid, however, although it takes much from Homer, is a celebration of the Roman state, to whose future domination Dido and Turnus must be sacrificed.
