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.
