As armies march from all over Latium to fight the Trojans, Turnus extends his appeal for help to Diomedes, who had engaged Aeneas in personal combat during the Trojan War and is now a ruler in southern Italy. Aware of this dangerous course of events, Aeneas anxiously tries to devise a plan of action.
One night while Aeneas is sleeping, the god of the Tiber River appears in a dream and tells the Trojan prince that he will find on the shore a white sow and her litter, which symbolically represent Alba Longa, to be founded by Ascanius after thirty years have passed—the number of sucklings in the litter. This discovery is the sign Helenus foretold to Aeneas: It is absolute proof that the Trojans have come to the right place at last. The river god also advises Aeneas to sail upstream to the city of Pallanteum and seek the aid of its king, Evander.
Waking, Aeneas prays to the river god and then finds the sow and her litter, all of which he sacrifices to Juno. He then sails up the Tiber with two of his oared ships and their crews. The next day, approaching Pallanteum, they come upon Evander, his son, Pallas, and a crowd of citizens, who are engaged in worshipping Hercules.
Aeneas, identifying his own people and his mission, is warmly received by Evander, a Greek who came to Italy with his people many years before and established Pallanteum, on the site of the future Rome. Aeneas tells Evander that the two are blood relatives: Dardanus, the founder of Troy and Aeneas’s ancestor, was the son of Electra, Atlas’s daughter; Evander’s father, Mercury, was the son of Maia, another of Atlas’s daughters.
Evander, who recollects having met Priam and Anchises when he was a young man, promises his full support against Turnus. He invites Aeneas and his company to be guests at the worship ceremony for Hercules, which is performed yearly as an offering of thanks to Hercules for killing Cacus, the fire-breathing giant who dwelt in a nearby cave and victimized Evander’s people.
Aeneas accompanies Evander to his home, and on the way Evander tells Aeneas that the region of Latium was formerly the realm of the god Saturn, who, banished by Jupiter, came here as an exile and taught the arts of civilization to the savage natives. In Pallanteum, Aeneas is shown sites that will be famous in later times when Rome is in its full glory, including the Capitol, the future city’s central hill.
That night, Venus visits her husband, Vulcan, the blacksmith of the gods, and persuades him to make weapons and armor for her son. The next day, Vulcan goes to his shop and orders his three smiths, who are Cyclopes, to begin the work. In Pallanteum, meanwhile, Evander advises Aeneas to go to the nearby city of Agylla—or Caere, now Cerveteri—a stronghold of the Etruscans, to seek their help. Having overthrown their evil king, Mezentius, who now has taken refuge with the Latins, the Etruscans are prepared to wage war against their former ruler. Because a seer has told the Etruscans that they must choose a non-Italian to lead them, they will welcome Aeneas as their leader.
Aeneas, at first doubtful about asking the Etruscans for help against the Latins, is given a go-ahead by his mother—tremendous crashes of thunder—and soon sets off for Agylla with Pallas, four hundred horsemen, and the pick of his own crew, the rest of whom he sends back to the Trojan camp downstream with a message to Ascanius informing him of what has happened.
At Agylla, Aeneas’s company joins the Etruscans, who are under the leadership of Tarchon. Here, Venus appears before her son with the arms and armor that Vulcan has forged for him. The masterpiece of the ensemble is a magnificent shield decorated with episodes from Roman history, of which Aeneas, of course, can have no knowledge, since all of these events lie in the future. The shield’s center depicts the crucial naval battle at Actium, which will mark the defeat of Antony and Cleopatra and the triumphant return to Rome of its future emperor and Virgil’s patron, Augustus.
