Eager to get the war under way, Juno sends Iris, a lesser goddess, to inform Turnus that he must take advantage of the absence of Aeneas, who has gone to win the support of Evander and the Etruscans, by attacking the Trojans now. Immediately responsive, the Rutulian warrior marches against his enemy. Rather than risk combat in the open, the Trojans withdraw into their camp to guard the ramparts, as Aeneas advised them to do before he left for Pallanteum.
Unable to reach the protected Trojans, Turnus decides to burn their ships. However, before the ships can be set ablaze, Jupiter, in answer to a plea from his mother, changes them all into sea nymphs, who swim away unharmed. In acting as he does, Jupiter fulfills a promise he made to his mother years before, when Aeneas built the ships from pine trees taken from her grove on Mount Ida, near Troy, where the Trojans found refuge after their defeat.
Turnus is not disturbed by the fleet’s transformation. In fact, he regards the ships’s disappearance as favorable: The Trojans now have no means of escape. Because night is coming, he delays another attack until the next day and orders his forces to rest until then.
In the Trojans’s camp, the inseparable companions, Nisus and Euryalus, who appeared in Book V as contestants in the foot race, volunteer and obtain permission to go to Aeneas in Pallanteum in order to inform him of the siege; hoping together to perform a glorious act of bravery, they are fearless. They go with the approval of their elders and Ascanius, who promises them that both he and his father will richly reward them.
Nisus and Euryalus pass safely through the enemy’s encampment, killing many warriors who lie in a drunken sleep. However, on the road to Pallanteum, they are intercepted by the Rutulian captain Volcens, who is leading a force of three hundred men to Turnus’s aid. The young Trojan men flee into a forest, where they become separated. Nisus manages to shake off pursuit and leave the woods, but Euryalus, who is hampered by armor he took as spoils from the Rutulian camp, is captured. Nisus, who has already reentered the forest to look for his companion, discovers him in enemy hands and boldly launches spears, killing two warriors. To avenge these deaths, Volcens slays Euryalus, provoking Nisus to slay the Rutulian captain in turn, only to die himself of wounds inflicted by Volcens’s defenders.
Volcens’s men proceed to Turnus’s encampment, where the carnage inflicted by Nisus and Euryalus causes great consternation. The next day, the two Trojans’s heads, impaled on spears, are exhibited to the Trojan defenders at their ramparts, and the battle begins. A great struggle follows, with Turnus’s forces attempting to scale the Trojan camp’s walls, only to be beaten back. A tower crashes, causing many deaths; two survivors are slain, one of them, trying vainly to get back over the wall, by Turnus. Ascanius, who slays Remulus, Turnus’s brother-in-law, with an arrow to punish him for mocking the Trojans’s manhood, is visited by Apollo, who praises the young Trojan prince for his skill but tells him that henceforth he must refrain from killing, as his purpose will be to promote peace.
Now, to provoke the Latin enemy, the brothers Pandarus and Bitias, guardians of the Trojan gate, fling it open. Latin warriors force themselves through it but are beaten back, while Trojans leave the camp and fight outside. Turnus slays Bitias, and the Latins, aroused by Mars, increase their assault as Pandarus manages to close the gate, shutting out many Trojans. Turnus, however, slips into the camp before the gate is shut, and a struggle ensues between him and Pandarus. The Rutulian prince, aided by Juno, is the victor. He proceeds to cause havoc among the Trojans, but they gradually get the upper hand. Undaunted by the vast number of Trojans fighting against him, at the very moment of greatest danger, Turnus escapes death by leaping fully armed into the Tiber River and swimming back to join his fellow warriors.
