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.
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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.
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We are in heaven. It is some time since the fall of Troy – Romulus, descendant of Trojan refugees from the fall of the city, has founded Rome and been rescued from mortality by his father, Mars, the God of War. In one of a series of poems at the beginning of Horace’s third book of Odes on Rome as it is, and (according to the moral and political programme of the new Emperor, Augustus) as it should be, Horace makes the point that Rome enjoys the divine seal of approval – her founder sits in Olympus as one of the Gods (and is reserving a place there for the Emperor Augustus). In the illustration, an ancient Roman bronze, the she-wolf suckles Romulus and his brother Remus.
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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.
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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.
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To Laelius, brother, parent, wife and child mean less than his loyalty to Caesar his commander. Hear his chilling speech in Lucan’s Latin and follow in English here.
The illustration is David’s “Oath of the Horatii”.