Hopes of peace have been dashed and Juno in person throws open the gates of war.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
See the illustrated blog post here.
With the help of the Fury Allecto, Juno, Aeneas’s enemy, has sabotaged King Latinus’s wish to welcome him and create an alliance by marriage to his daughter. Overcome, the old man withdraws from the fray and Juno herself intervenes to open the gates of war.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
In a moment of the highest importance for the future of Rome, and the plot of the Aeneid, Juno finally relinquishes her enmity towards the Trojans which has seen the city fall and Aeneas harried over land and sea. Her consent is made easier by Jupiter’s agreement that the identity of the people who will become the Romans will remain Italian, and not be subsumed into the speech and customs of the Trojans.
Hear Virgil’s Latin and follow in English here.
On deep consideration, King Latinus accedes to Aeneas’s request through his ambassadors for peaceful permission to settle, and is ready to offer him his daughter’s hand in marriage. The prospects for peace look bright, but they are fragile and Juno is ready to take a hand and sow discord.
Hear the extract in Latin and follow in English here.
King Latinus, informed that strangers have arrived in the kingdom and that ambassadors have come to wait on him, goes to the heart of his court to receive them, a resplendent building with a hundred columns at the top of the city. It stands in a dense, sacred wood and serves as a temple as well as a throne-room, containing the spoils of war along with carvings of Latinus’s predecessors. One of these is of King Picus, whom the sorceress Circe turned into a woodpecker when he rejected her advances. He is not visible in this picture of Circe and her shape-shifted pets: perhaps he is staying out of reach of her lions and foxes.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.