65 pages • 2-hour read
Aeneid
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Quiz
NEWSummaries & Analyses
Plot Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Further Reading & Resources
Reading Tools
Books 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 7 Summary
After burying Aeneas’s nurse, Caieta, who dies suddenly at the beginning of the book, the Trojans sail past Aeaea, the island of the enchantress Circe from Homer’s Odyssey, and make their way into Italy up the river Tiber (1-24). Virgil appeals to Erato, the muse of erotic poetry, to help him describe the socio-political state of Italy at the time. The ruler of Latium was king Latinus. His daughter Lavinia was betrothed to Turnus, a local ruler favored by the queen, Amata (45-55). Now, portents suggest complications to the plan: A swarm of bees’ nests in the local sacred laurel tree, meaning that a foreign army is coming to settle here, and Lavinia appears to catch flame but is unharmed (59-80). Troubled, Latinus consults the oracle of his father, the forest god Faunus, who orders him to marry Lavinia to a foreigner (97-101). As in Carthage in Book 4, Rumor begins to spread through the countryside.
Meanwhile, the Trojans observe omens of their own. When they are driven by hunger to eat the flatbread they have rested their food on, Ascanius observes that they are eating their tables, fulfilling the prophecy of the Harpies from Book 3 and indicating they have found the land they’re meant to settle (107-29). Jupiter auspiciously thunders three times when Aeneas offers his thanks (136-45).
As Aeneas sets out the boundaries of his new city, Trojan emissaries reach king Latinus’s court. Virgil describes many Latin religious and social customs that would have been familiar to Romans of Virgil’s day (170-89). On his throne, Latinus welcomes the Trojans as guests. He is aware that the Trojan ancestor Dardanus is said to be from this area but wonders if they were blown here by a storm. Aeneas’s commander, Ilioneus, confirms that “pre-set plans and free-willed souls brought us to this city” after the fall of Troy (215). He emphasizes Aeneas’s divine lineage and swears the Latins will not regret accepting them as allies (219-40). Latinus realizes that Aeneas must be the foreigner Lavinia is fated to marry. He chooses fine gifts to send him and asks to meet him in person (252-85).
It seems the Trojans’ struggles are at an end, but Juno has other plans: “I won’t be allowed to repel [Aeneas] from Latium’s kingdoms, / And it’s immovably fixed in the fates that he’ll marry Lavinia. / Yet…there is room to prolong and delay these momentous proceedings […]” (313-15). She summons the Fury Allecto from the Underworld to foment civil war among the Italians (324-40).
Allecto first enrages Amata, the queen of Latium, at the idea of Lavinia marrying Aeneas instead of Turnus. Amata argues that technically Turnus is a foreigner, too (fulfilling the oracle), but when Latinus does not bite, she pretends to be a bacchant—a crazed worshipper of the god of revelry, Bacchus—and rouses the mothers of the city against the Trojans (385-405).
Allecto next travels to Turnus in a dream. In the guise of his maidservant, she reminds him that Lavinia was betrothed to him first and the outsider Aeneas is stealing his throne (421-34). When Turnus chastises her for “making up these false figures of fright” (445), Allecto reveals her true self and stabs her fiery brand into his heart (445-57). Turnus wakes with a start and calls for his arms. He and his Rutulians plan to attack Latinus, who they believe has betrayed them, and repel the foreigners from their borders (467-69).
Allecto moves on to the Trojan camp, where she tricks Ascanius into shooting a pet deer that is beloved to the Latins (475-502). As the shepherds mourn, Allecto herself sounds the alarm, rousing the whole countryside (503-24). The Trojans and Latins begin fighting. Allecto offers to make things even worse, but Juno reins her in and dismisses her, as she knows Jupiter will have a problem with an Underworld creature running amok (540-71).
Turnus and the other rebel Italians surround Latinus’s city (577-600). They demand he open the War Gates to rouse the war god Mars (a custom that the Romans adopted), but Latinus refuses. Juno opens them herself (601-23). Virgil asks the Muses to help him catalogue the Latin troops who answer the call (641-817). He mentions several minor characters, many of whom prominent Romans of his time claimed as ancestors. The most important figures for the narrative are the impious Mezentius and his devoted son Lausus (648-50), Turnus (783-86), and the warrior girl Camilla (803-17).
Book 8 Summary
As the war heats up, Aeneas dreams of Tiberius, the patron god of the river Tiber. Tiberius tells him where to find the final portent, the albino sow nursing 30 piglets first mentioned by Helenus in Book 3. He also encourages him to sail upriver and form an alliance with king Evander and his Arcadians, Greek descendants of the goddess Minerva who are also at war with the Latins (31-67). When Aeneas wakes, he finds the sow and sacrifices her to Juno, as instructed by Tiberius, to placate her (81-85).
Aeneas takes two ships to Arcadia. The Arcadians flee in terror, but Evander’s son, Pallas, bravely meets them and takes them to his father (98-125). Aeneas tells Evander he knows of his connection with the Greeks (Evander is related to the top Greek commanders in the Trojan war, Agamemnon and Menelaus) but reminds him that he also has connections with the Trojans (via the Titan Atlas) (127-51). Evander reveals that he greatly respected Aeneas’s father when they met in his youth and agrees to support him (160-74).
As they feast together, Evander tells Aeneas that they celebrate this festival to commemorate the hero Hercules defending their settlement from the monstrous cannibal Cacus. Cacus had stolen four of Hercules’s cattle, dragging them backwards by the tail to reverse their track marks, but one of the bulls lowed from within his cave, revealing his location. Hercules ripped the roof off the mountain and, though Cacus belched fire and shrouded his home in smoke, Hercules found him and strangled him (191-275).
On their walk home from the feast, Evander describes how this area came to be populated when Saturn, the father of Jupiter and Juno, was exiled from heaven and laid hidden here, giving the local peoples a law code and civilization. Saturn ruled over a Golden Age that slowly degraded, a common motif in ancient historiography (314-27). Evander points out various landmarks that would come to be important locations in Roman history, like Tarpeia’s Rock and the seven hills of Rome. They go to sleep for the night.
Meanwhile, Venus, concerned for Aeneas’s safety in the upcoming war, approaches her husband, the smith god Vulcan. Using her wiles as the goddess of sexual desire, she convinces him to forge divine arms for Aeneas. Vulcan travels to the volcanic caverns of Mount Etna (in Sicily, see Book 3, lines 570-82). With his assistants the Cyclopes, he begins forging the weapons (370-453).
The next morning, Evander tells Aeneas that he is glad he has come; the Arcadians want to punish a sadistic local warlord, Mezentius, now an ally of Turnus (478-95). Virgil first introduced Mezentius in the catalogue of Italian troops (Book 7, 648-50). Evander is too old to lead the resistance, and his son Pallas is ineligible because of his mixed lineage, but Aeneas will serve as a perfect figurehead. Evander entrusts Pallas to him as an apprentice (511-17). Aeneas and the Trojans are unsure, but the sky crackles, and Venus shows a vision of blazing armor. Aeneas recognizes this as a symbol from his mother that she has commissioned sacred arms from Vulcan for him to use (520-44).
Evander tearfully embraces Pallas as the Trojans prepare to leave: “Son, if I were what I was [when I was young], I would never be torn from your loving arms” (568-69). He begs Jupiter to protect his son in battle, preferring to die now than to live with the knowledge of his death.
The Trojans and their Arcadian reinforcements hole up on a hilltop. Glowing white, Venus arrives to bring Aeneas his arms. Loveliest of all is the shield; Virgil spends the rest of the book describing the scenes of Roman achievement engraved on its surface. Some of it centers on early Roman mythological history, including the famous image of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a she-wolf and morality tales of various Roman kings and heroes (630-66). It also features political figures contemporary to Virgil’s age in the afterlife, like the irascible senator Cato and the political conspirator Catiline (666-70). In a place of prominence is a depiction of Actium, the climactic battle in the Roman civil war between Octavian Augustus and his opponents in Egypt, Marc Antony and his lover Cleopatra. The shield also features various other peoples the Romans would conquer (675-728). Aeneas marvels at the artwork but has no way of understanding or recognizing the scenes (729-31).
Books 7-8 Analysis
Book 7 opens with an unexpected detail: Aeneas buries his wetnurse from childhood, Caieta (1-7). We might find this jarring—Virgil has not mentioned Caieta before—but the poet is underlining a point he has already made in Book 6, with Aeneas’s farewell to his father. Aeneas is leaving behind his Trojan past and becoming fully oriented to his Roman future; as the Bible describes in Corinthians 13:11, in becoming a man, he is putting aside childish things. Virgil gives a pointed example of this shifting of roles: Where father Anchises was previously the interpreter of oracles and Aeneas the dutiful student, Virgil repeats this dynamic, but this time with Aeneas as the authority and Ascanius the learner. In Book 7, Ascanius observes, without quite understanding what he is saying, that they are eating their “tables,” which Aeneas then interprets as fulfilling the prophecy from the harpy Celaeno (116-29).
After this brief interlude concerning Caieta, Virgil appeals to the Muse again, as he is embarking on a new epic of sorts: the Iliad section of his Aeneid. He asks for the help of the Muse Erato, who governs literature about love. Like Homer’s Iliad, these books will cover a war over a woman: The new Helen of Troy is Lavinia, the princess of Latium whose hand Turnus and Aeneas are competing to win.
Virgil, however, is not too deferential to the Homeric past. Book 7 also leans forward heavily into the Roman future, particularly in Aeneas’s visit to Latinus’s city. Many of the Latin customs Virgil describes there would have been recognizable as Roman to his audience: Aeneas sees the Roman fasces, a Senate house, images of the ancestors, and war spoils, for example (170-90). In fact, everything goes almost too well—it seems the action of the poem might be over, as Latinus is already fully prepared to marry Aeneas to Lavinia.
Juno—the poem’s agent of delay, and now Virgil’s metaliterary ally in prolonging the narrative—stirs up trouble yet again. She raises another female force, the Fury Allecto, to infect queen Amata and Turnus with a passion for civil war. While Amata is easily convinced—Virgil portrays her desire for Turnus as borderline inappropriate—we are surprised to find that Turnus is initially more reluctant to go to war. He has no interest in fighting Aeneas until Allecto plunges the fiery torch of anger into his breast, suggesting that Turnus, like Aeneas, may lack some measure of free will in all this. He, too, is a plaything of the gods.
In Book 8, Aeneas ventures out to Arcadia and Pallanteum, the city of Evander and the future site of Rome. Virgil takes some time to, again, root his narrative in Virgil’s Roman present by having Evander take Aeneas on a tour of the city. He references several future Roman landmarks, the most important of which is the Ara Maxima, the altar to Hercules in Rome’s ancient cattle market. He contextualizes the altar with a myth about a fight between Hercules and the monster Cacus.
On a basic level the fight between Hercules and Cacus represents a prototypical struggle between good and evil, civilization and anarchy, but there are more subtle, troubling details, too. Cacus is a brutal killer, but Hercules succumbs to an awful rage in killing him—a situation that might evoke Augustus’s ruthless quelling of civil war in Virgil’s day. It is left unclear whether Hercules’s rage in this episode was necessary or justified, and a similar question will remain regarding Aeneas’s rage at the end of Book 12.
The end of Book 8—the description of the images on the shield of Aeneas—is one of the most famous parts of the epic. It is modeled, again, on a Homeric precedent, the Iliad’s famous Shield of Achilles in Book 18. The shield not only prophesies a glorious Roman future, but also presents more examples of good (and bad) Romans for Aeneas and the readers of Virgil’s epic to emulate. In what at this point feels like a sad but expected detail, Virgil tells the reader that though Aeneas is delighted at the glory depicted on the shield, he does not understand it. The man who sacrifices so much to create the Roman nation never sees it himself.
Unlock all 65 pages of this Study Guide
Get in-depth, chapter-by-chapter summaries and analysis from our literary experts.
- Grasp challenging concepts with clear, comprehensive explanations
- Revisit key plot points and ideas without rereading the book
- Share impressive insights in classes and book clubs