Aeneid, Book 7 — Arrival in Latium; Allecto Inflames the War

Reading Troy — chapter 45 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 7

Aeneid, Book 7 — Arrival in Latium; Allecto Inflames the War (Days after the descent in Book 6; the mouth of the Tiber and the inland kingdom of Latinus; the cycle's transition into its Iliadic second half)

The Trojan fleet rounds the headland of Caieta — Aeneas's old nurse, who has just died and given her name to Cape Gaeta on the Italian coast (one of Virgil's many Italian etiologies) — and runs north up the Tiber's mouth. The river welcomes them. They land on a wooded bank. They prepare a meal; they have brought wheat cakes as plates for the food; when the cakes are eaten too, Ascanius cries "look, we're eating our tables." Aeneas remembers Celaeno the harpy's prophecy from Book 3 ("you shall not gird your destined town with walls until hunger compel you to gnaw the tables you eat from"); the curse was a route-marker. They have arrived.

Aeneas sends an embassy of a hundred men, led by his loyal Ilioneus, into the inland kingdom of Latinus, king of Latium. They go by river and road. Latinus is an old king, descended from Saturn, whose daughter Lavinia is of marriageable age and whom the oracles have said must be married to a foreigner. Latinus receives the Trojans in his colonnaded palace (Virgil pauses on the great wooden columns with statues of his Italian ancestors — Janus, Saturn, Picus, Faunus). The embassy offers gifts and asks for a small portion of land. Latinus, recognising in Aeneas the foreign son-in-law the oracles named, grants the request and offers Lavinia as his bride.

Juno, watching from the air, sees the war she dreads becoming a peaceful alliance. She descends to summon Allecto — one of the three Furies, the snake-haired sister whose specialty is sowing discord in households. Virgil's description of Allecto is one of the cycle's most disturbing pieces of personification: her hair, her viper-fingers, her grief-bringing torch. Juno orders her to inflame the war. Allecto goes first to Queen Amata, Latinus's wife, who had hoped to marry Lavinia to Turnus, prince of the Rutuli (a neighbouring people). Allecto throws a snake at Amata's breast; the snake winds into her hair invisibly and pours its poison into her mind; Amata becomes obsessed with hating the Trojan match; she runs through the city as if in a Bacchic frenzy, dragging Lavinia and hiding her in the woods.

Allecto then goes to Turnus in his own city. He is young, beautiful, fierce, prince of the Rutuli, a "second Achilles" (the Sibyl's Book 6 phrase comes back to him here, also born of a goddess — Venilia, a water-nymph). Allecto comes to him in vision as Calybe, an old priestess of Juno; she tells him the foreign match is being made against him; she throws her torch into his chest. He wakes raging. He arms; he gathers his Rutulian forces; he sends to his allies.

Allecto's third move is the Italian-rustic kindling. She inflames Iulus's (Ascanius's) hunting dogs to chase the tame stag of Silvia, daughter of the royal herdsman Tyrrhus. Ascanius shoots the stag. The stag drags itself home dying; the country people rise in arms against the Trojans for the offence; the first blood of the war is shed at a rural skirmish; the Italian war begins not in a great battle but in a hunting accident exploited.

The book closes with one of Virgil's longest and most studied set-pieces: the catalogue of Italian forces who muster against the Trojans. It is the structural counterpart of Iliad 2's catalogue of ships — Italian leader by Italian leader, town by town, geographic region by region. The catalogue includes Mezentius the deposed Etruscan tyrant; Lausus his beautiful son; Aventinus son of Hercules; the brothers Catillus and Coras of Tibur; Caeculus the founder of Praeneste; Messapus the horse-tamer; Halaesus from the Aurunci; Oebalus from Capreae; Ufens from the rocky country; Umbro the marsh-priest of the Marsi; and at the close the maiden warrior Camilla, queen of the Volsci, virgin huntress dedicated to Diana, who rides at the head of her people through the cypress-groves of her mountain kingdom. The catalogue is one of Virgil's most beautiful: each name carries a small territory of Italian local-tradition, and the cumulative effect is the Aeneid showing its Augustan readership the legendary roots of half the towns they knew. Book 7 closes with the Italian war fully mustered and ready for battle.

Analysis

The Aeneid's structural pivot

Aeneid 7 is the structural pivot of the entire poem. Virgil himself signals this with an unusual second invocation of the Muse at the book's opening — "Now Erato, come, who were the kings and who were the people, what the state of old Latium, when the foreign army first beached its ships on the Italian shore"; the second invocation marks the Aeneid's transition into its Iliadic half. The first half of the poem (1-6) has been Odyssean: wandering, hospitality, descent. The second half (7-12) will be Iliadic: war, single combat, the death of a young warrior, the killing of an enemy champion. The shape of the Aeneid is therefore a deliberate fusion of the two Homeric epics; Virgil's audience would have recognised the structural move with each invocation.

The harpy-prophecy fulfilled

Aeneas's recognition that the eating-the-tables moment fulfils Celaeno's prophecy is one of the cycle's most elegant pieces of structural payoff. The curse from Aeneid 3 has been carried by Aeneas for years as a doom; here it turns out to be a gentle route-marker. Virgil's pattern — prophecy spoken, misinterpreted, fulfilled in an unexpected mild way, recognised in retrospect — is the cycle's wisdom about how the future actually arrives. The harpy was angry, but her words were merely descriptive. The cycle's prophetic apparatus is not punitive but informational; the punishment was in the listener's fear.

Latinus and the Italian background

Virgil's description of Latinus's palace, with its statues of Janus, Saturn, Picus, Faunus, is one of the Aeneid's most concentrated single passages of Italian-religious back-story. Latinus is descended from Saturn, the old Italian god of agriculture and the golden age; the Italian background of the poem is therefore not the Greek/Trojan eastern Mediterranean but the older Italian peninsula with its own gods and its own founders. Virgil is doing one of his most consistent things: weaving the Italian local-tradition into the Trojan-refugee narrative. The Aeneid is not only an importation of Trojan civilisation into Italy; it is also a recognition that Italy already had its own civilisation, and that what Aeneas does is fuse Trojan with Italian to produce Roman. The Roman synthesis is therefore older than Aeneas's arrival; he is the catalyst, not the sole source.

Allecto

Virgil's Allecto is the cycle's most disturbing single allegorical figure since Fama in Book 4. She is one of the three Furies (Allecto, Megaera, Tisiphone) of older Greek tradition, but Virgil gives her a particular personality: she specialises in domestic discord, in inflaming households against themselves. Her three actions in Book 7 — the snake to Amata, the torch to Turnus, the chase to Ascanius's dogs — are a precisely structured triad. Each move escalates: from household, to neighbouring prince, to first blood in the field. Allecto is also Virgil's argument that the Italian war is not fated by the will of Jupiter (who in Book 1 promised Roman peace) but is willed against fate by Juno through her infernal agent. The war that founds Rome is, in Virgil's careful theology, an unnecessary war made necessary by divine grudge. The cycle's most morally serious epic theology turns on this distinction.

Amata

Queen Amata's frenzy is one of the cycle's most painful pieces of domestic-discord writing. She is Lavinia's mother; she had hoped to marry her daughter to Turnus (a princely match within the Italian community); the foreign match destroys her hopes for her family's continuity. Virgil's pathology of Amata's possession by the snake is precise — she does not become a different person, she becomes a more extreme version of her existing maternal love. Her Bacchic running through the city with Lavinia is the cycle's most disturbing image of mother-and-daughter undone by political violence. She will reappear in Book 12 to commit suicide when she believes Turnus dead, the cycle's second female suicide (after Dido) caused by men's wars.

Turnus

Turnus's entry is the introduction of the Aeneid's antagonist. He is the "second Achilles" the Sibyl prophesied — beautiful, young, fierce, born of a goddess (the water-nymph Venilia), promised Lavinia, robbed of her by Aeneas's arrival. Virgil constructs Turnus with deliberate sympathy. He is not an obvious villain; he is a man who has had a marriage taken from him by a foreigner with no prior claim. The cycle's reader is meant to feel his rage at first as justified. Virgil will then complicate this through the next five books, showing Turnus's increasing brutality alongside his continuing claim. The poem's most-debated single moral question is whether Aeneas is justified in killing Turnus in Book 12, and Virgil deliberately constructs Turnus in Book 7 to make the question unresolvable.

The catalogue of Italian forces

The closing catalogue is one of Virgil's most-studied set-pieces and the cycle's most consequential piece of Italian-geographical writing. It runs ten leaders long, each given a small territorial-mythological context. Mezentius, "contemptor divum" (despiser of the gods), is the catalogue's darkest entry; his beautiful son Lausus is given a long affectionate epitaph in advance. Camilla closes the catalogue and gets the longest treatment — the Volscian maiden-warrior who can run across water without wetting her feet, who was raised in the wilderness by her exiled father Metabus, who is dedicated to Diana. She will be the Aeneid's most-mourned single warrior in Book 11. The catalogue is Virgil's argument for the cultural depth of pre-Roman Italy. Each town named was a real Augustan-period Italian town; Virgil's audience could trace their own local histories through the names. The Aeneid is here at its most local and most loving toward the country of its making.

Dryden's catalogue

Dryden's English handles the catalogue with characteristic Augustan formality. Each Italian leader gets his small heroic-couplet vignette, the named places clearly anchored in their geography, the small mythological back-stories preserved. The translator's strength in formal lists serves the book's close particularly well; the catalogue is one of the Aeneid's most-imitated set-pieces and Dryden's English version is one of the most-quoted in subsequent English literature. The Camilla portrait at the close is given the full romantic-Augustan treatment — Dryden writes her with care, and the passage stands as one of the great moments in his Aeneid.

What to watch for

• Book 8 will take Aeneas up the Tiber to Pallanteum, the small Arcadian-Greek settlement on the future site of Rome ruled by King Evander, whose son Pallas will become the cycle's most-mourned young Trojan ally.
• Book 9 will give us the Trojan camp besieged by Turnus; the night-raid of Nisus and Euryalus.
• Book 10 will bring the council of the gods and the war's first great battles; the death of Pallas.
• Book 11 will give us the funeral of Pallas and the aristeia and death of Camilla.
• Book 12 will close with Aeneas killing Turnus in single combat.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Aeneid 7 is the cycle's most explicit pivot from Odyssean to Iliadic register. Its second invocation of the Muse — Erato — answers the Iliad's opening invocation ("Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles") by formally announcing that the Italian war is now the poem's subject. The eating-the-tables fulfilment of Celaeno's prophecy answers Aeneid 3's curse and follows the cycle's deepest pattern about prophecy (spoken truly, misread, fulfilled mildly, recognised in retrospect). The Italian-religious back-story in Latinus's palace reaches back to Saturn and Janus — older than the Trojan war, older than the Iliad's gods — and roots the cycle's transition into a pre-Greek European mythology. Allecto reaches back to the cycle's standard Greek-tragic Furies (Aeschylus's Eumenides) and forward to every subsequent allegorical figure of discord; her three-action structure (snake to Amata, torch to Turnus, hunt to Ascanius's dogs) is one of Virgil's most precisely composed pieces of allegorical staging. The catalogue of Italian forces structurally echoes Iliad 2's catalogue of ships: same form, opposite politics — the Iliad's catalogue muster the army that will destroy Troy, the Aeneid's catalogue musters the army that will fight Troy's refugees in Italy. The cycle's grim symmetry is that the Trojan side has fought catalogues of Greeks for ten years and now must fight a catalogue of Italians for an extra war. Turnus as "second Achilles" reaches back to Aeneid 6.89, the Sibyl's prophecy, and to the Iliad's Achilles directly — Virgil is constructing his antagonist with explicit Achillean materials. Camilla's portrait at the close of the catalogue reaches back to Penthesilea in Posthomerica 1 (the warrior-maiden, the Amazonian dignity, the predicted tragic death); the cycle's two warrior-maidens are structural rhymes.

Forward echoes

Book 8 is the immediate sequel: Aeneas sails up the Tiber to the small Greek-Arcadian settlement of Pallanteum (the future site of Rome) ruled by King Evander, whose son Pallas will become Aeneas's young companion; the Shield of Aeneas, forged by Vulcan at Venus's request, will be unveiled there. Book 9 will give us the Trojan camp besieged by Turnus in Aeneas's absence; the night-raid of Nisus and Euryalus (the pair established in Aeneid 5). Book 10 will deliver the death of Pallas at Turnus's hand — the cycle's most-mourned young Trojan ally — and will start the chain of revenges that drives the poem to its close. Book 11 will give us the funeral of Pallas and the aristeia and death of Camilla, the warrior-maiden introduced here. Book 12 will close with Aeneas killing Turnus in single combat at the moment Turnus is begging for mercy and Aeneas sees Pallas's swordbelt on him. The Italian war set up in Book 7 will therefore drive the remaining five books of the poem; every figure introduced in this book's catalogue will appear again, fight, in most cases die. Amata's frenzy here will become her suicide in Book 12 when she believes Turnus dead — the cycle's second female suicide. The historical-Augustan resonance of the Italian catalogue (each town named was a real Augustan-period Italian community) reaches forward into the cycle's continuing role as the Aeneid was the schoolbook of Italian primary education for nearly two thousand years — Italians from the late Republic to the twentieth century knew their towns' local histories partly through this catalogue. Virgil's most-loved single book among Italian readers is sometimes Book 7 for exactly this reason.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — arrives at the Tiber; recognises Celaeno's prophecy fulfilled in the eating-the-tables; sends embassy to Latinus
• Ascanius — observes the eating-the-tables; his hounds chase the tame stag; the war's first incident
• Latinus — king of Latium; recognises Aeneas as the prophesied foreign son-in-law; offers Lavinia
• Amata — Latinus's queen; infected by Allecto's snake; opposes the Trojan match; hides Lavinia
• Turnus — prince of the Rutuli; the "second Achilles"; promised Lavinia by Amata; inflamed by Allecto's torch to war
• Lavinia — Latinus's daughter; the disputed bride; hidden by her mother in the woods
• Hera — Juno; summons Allecto; her old grudge becomes the war's first cause
• Camilla — Volscian maiden-warrior; closes the catalogue of Italian forces; her death in Book 11 will be the cycle's most-mourned

Mentioned / off-stage

• Achilles — long dead; the "second Achilles" formulation of Turnus invokes him
• Creusa — long dead; the prophecy that Aeneas would marry a foreign bride is being fulfilled now
• Anchises — long dead; his Book 6 instructions are now being followed
• Dido — long dead; her shade in the Fields of Mourning will not see this fulfilment of what she begged Aeneas to forsake
• Mezentius — the deposed Etruscan tyrant; introduced in the Italian catalogue; will face Aeneas in Book 10
• Pallas — Evander's son at Pallanteum; not yet on stage; will join the Trojans in Book 8 and die in Book 10
• Evander — Arcadian-Greek king of Pallanteum on the future site of Rome; not yet on stage; Book 8

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.