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Aeneid
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Books 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 9 Summary
Juno sends the messenger goddess Iris to Turnus, encouraging him to strike while Aeneas is busy wooing the Arcadians (1-24). Turnus and his general Messapus attack the Trojan fortifications, but Aeneas has wisely instructed his men to defend the camp rather than risk a counterattack, frustrating their efforts (40-46).
Turnus instead tries to burn down the Trojan fleet, but he fails; Virgil makes an aside to explain why. When Aeneas was building the ships on Mt. Ida, a mountain near Troy sacred to Cybele, the goddess asked her son Jupiter to make the sacred wood indestructible. Jupiter hesitated, as indestructible ships might interfere with the designs of fate, but he agreed to transform the ships into goddesses once they had taken Aeneas to Italy (77-106). Most of the Italians are terrified to see the Trojan ships now metamorphize into female forms that swim off to sea, but Turnus is emboldened. Without their ships, the Trojans cannot escape him (116-32). He has his own destiny, he contends: to marry Lavinia, who has been stolen from him just as the Trojan Paris one stole Helen from the Greeks, kicking off the Trojan War. He suggests his Rutulians siege the Trojan camp just as the Greeks sieged Troy (146-59).
The Trojans nervously keep watch inside. The lovers Nisus and Euryalus, from the footrace in Book 5, hatch a plan to sneak out under cover of night and bring word to Aeneas of what is happening (186-96). Nisus wants to go alone, as he feels Euryalus is too young to die, but Euryalus refuses to leave his side. Together they convince Ascanius and the Trojan leaders to allow the expedition. If they succeed in bringing Aeneas back, Ascanius promises Nisus several valuable items and to take Euryalus as his personal companion and confidant, but Euryalus has only one request: that Ascanius console his mother if he dies (255-92). Everyone weeps at the sentiment, especially Ascanius, who is “Touched by the image it conjured of righteous love for a father” (294).
Outside, the Italians are drunk and sleeping. Nisus and Euryalus kill several of them and greedily steal their valuables before Nisus notices dawn is approaching and calls off the attack. He knows “this orgy of slaughter, this passion, is stealing his reason” (354). As they sneak off, the glimmer of Euryalus’s helmet is spotted by a contingent of 300 Italians returning to camp. Nisus manages to escape but loses Euryalus in the dark. When he sees him snatched up by the enemy, he starts throwing javelins. The Italian leader, Volcens, kills Euryalus out of frustration and vengeance; Virgil compares the drooping of Euryalus’s head as he dies to the droop of a poppy weighed down by rain (435-37).
Driven mad with grief, Nisus jumps into the fray to slay Volcens. Dying, he throws his body forward so he can die next to Euryalus. In a rare address to his own characters, Virgil tells the couple, “Fortune has blessed you both! If there’s magical charm in my verses, / No day will ever delete you from time’s recollection […]” (446-47). The Italians mourn the many men Nisus and Euryalus killed. The next day, Turnus orders the pair’s heads to be put on pikes, greatly demoralizing the Trojans. Euryalus’s mother is inconsolable (465-502).
The siege continues. Virgil calls again on the Muses, specifically Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, to describe Turnus’s onslaught (525-29). He catches a Trojan tower on fire and topples it (530-44), then kills a young Trojan solider named Lycus in a heated one-on-one exchange (556-66). Ascanius takes part in battle for the first time, shooting down Turnus’s brother-in-law Numulus, who ranted about the effeminacy of the Trojans due to their Eastern origins. Ascanius asks for Jupiter’s support in shooting his arrow, which the god grants (590-637). From heaven Apollo sees his prowess and steps in in the form of the elderly Trojan Butes, encouraging him to withdraw from battle due to his youth. He disappears, making it clear he was a god, but Ascanius still needs to be held back from further fighting by the Trojans (638-63).
A few Trojans open the gate to bait the Italians into the chokehold it creates; the fighting there is furious. Turnus, “monstrously angered,” rushes to join (694). The Trojans close the gate again but unknowingly lock Turnus in with them. Virgil compares him to a tiger locked in with the cattle (728-30). When one Trojan soldier threatens him, Turnus calmly responds, “You’ll tell Priam yourself that you’ve found an Achilles right here too” (742). Turnus could have ended the war right then and there if he had remembered to open the gate for his allies, but his battle lust causes him to ignore it in favor of killing more Trojans (756-61). Juno supports his efforts. Turnus routs them until the Trojan commanders Mnestheus and Serestus amp up their men and force Turnus back to the river Tiber, where he leaps into the river and escapes.
Book 10 Summary
On Olympus, Jupiter calls a meeting of the gods. He wonders why a few of their number are sowing discord between the Trojans and Italians. Venus counters that Turnus is rampaging in the Trojan camp with Aeneas gone, and even worse, another army is likely approaching, led by the Greek warrior Diomedes, who almost killed Aeneas in the Trojan War (17-30). Juno has arranged all this and more—Venus mentions the burned fleet (Book 5) and storm unleashed by Aeolus (Book 1). If it is Jupiter’s will to let Juno win, she requests to save Ascanius, at least; “As for Aeneas, well, let him indeed be tossed amid unknown / Waters and follows such random course as Fortune devises” (48-49).
Juno retorts that no one forced Aeneas to leave his camp and its defense to his young son, or to put Turnus in a position necessitating he act to secure his ascendance to the throne (65-73). From a certain point of view, Juno argues, the Trojan refugees are ruthless colonizers (74-79). Venus interferes just as much as she does, and anyway, it was Venus’s fault that the Trojan War happened at all, because she allowed the Trojan prince Paris to abduct Helen from the Greeks (89-95). The gods are in an uproar; Jupiter silences them. Since Venus and Juno will not allow the Trojans and Italians to be allies, he will withdraw from the affair completely and make himself impartial (104-16).
On the ground the battle is not going well for the Trojans, but Ascanius, Mnestheus, and Capys distinguish themselves. Aeneas has stopped by another indigenous Italian court on the way back down the Tiber and has secured the assistance of Tarchon and the Etruscans (147-54). Virgil appeals to the Muses to help him catalogue Aeneas’s allies now; Book 7 dealt with Turnus’s forces (163-214).
Anxious, Aeneas is steering his ship himself when he sees sea nymphs dancing on the surface of the water; they are his boats, magically transformed by Cybele in Book 9 (219-21). The nymphs warn him of what is happening in his camp and give his ships a speed boost, but Aeneas does not quite understand. He prays to Cybele for her protection (228-55). As they near the camp, he raises his divine shield as a beacon. His men cheer. Turnus is eager to meet him on the beach, claiming, “Fortune favors the bold” (284).
Aeneas enters a battle fury, and Pallas gives an inspiring speech to his Arcadian comrades and jumps into the fray. Virgil describes the hand-to-hand combat in graphic detail—for example, “Pallas […] / Buried his sword in the angrily panting lungs […]” (387). Pallas and Lausus—the noble son of the impious king Mezentius—come close to fighting, but Jupiter keeps them apart. They are fated to be killed by greater warriors than each other (433-38).
Turnus’s sister, a minor goddess named Juturna, tells Turnus to save Lausus, but Turnus is more interested in pursuing Pallas. Pallas is shocked at the sight of him but steels himself (439-51). He asks Hercules for help, which the hero cannot provide. Jupiter consoles his son: “Each man has his day marked. Life’s short years can’t be recovered. That’s why a man’s real task is to reach beyond life in achievement, / Pass beyond fate, beyond rumour to fame” (467-69). After a surprisingly brief fight, Turnus spears and kills Pallas (482-89). Though he says Pallas’s death is just and deserved, he allows him the dignity of a burial, but he takes his sword belt as a spoil of war. Virgil foreshadows the end of the poem: “Turnus will find there’s a time when he’ll […] hate these spoils and the day he won them” (503-04).
Aeneas is enraged when he hears what has happened. He takes a few prisoners to be sacrificed for Pallas’s funeral pyre and seeks Turnus, cruelly killing various opponents who beg for mercy along the way and even denying them burial (510-601). He is “Out of control, like a torrent in flood, like a raging tornado / Black in the sky” (603-04). Juno recognizes Turnus is in danger with Aeneas in this state. Since she wants only to delay his death, while accepting that he will eventually die, Jupiter allows her to nab him from the conflict (611-27). She hurls herself down from heaven and creates a pseudo-Aeneas, which pretends to flee and lures Turnus from the front lines into safety on a ship (436-52). Mortified to seem so cowardly, Turnus tries to commit suicide or swim back to shore, but Juno prevents him.
Back in the battle, Turnus’s ally, the evil king Mezentius, takes the spotlight (689-754). Though his opponents hate him for his tyrannical cruelties (recall Evander’s complaints about him in Book 7, lines 478-95), they are afraid to fight him (715-19). Mezentius misses Aeneas with his spear, but Aeneas’s hits its target, wounding Mezentius but not killing him. Mezentius’s son Lausus “on seeing this sight, groans deeply for love of his cherished / Father” (790-91). Virgil speaks to Lausus directly: “You’re worthy of being remembered” (794). Lausus throws himself forward, taking the killing sword blow meant for his father. Aeneas pities him deeply, as Lausus reminds him of “his own righteous love for his father” (824). He allows Lausus’s comrades to take his body back with his armor.
Mezentius is horrified at his son’s death. He had already hurt him while he was alive by getting them both exiled from their kingdom. He gears up for battle and charges at Aeneas with a death wish. Aeneas strikes him down and vaunts over him. With his last breath, Mezentius requests to be buried with his son (900-08).
Books 9-10 Analysis
The most important episode of Book 9 is the night raid of Nisus and Euryalus. It is modeled, again, on a Homeric scene; this time Virgil is thinking of the night raid of Diomedes and Odysseus from Book 10 of the Iliad. This Homeric echo, though, is particularly significant because it represents a valorous send-off to two the most Homeric characters left in the book. Like Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, Nisus and Euryalus are in a devoted same-sex relationship. While the Romans did not necessarily denigrate sexual relations between two men, they were only acceptable if one partner was of a lower class or a slave. Such a relationship would be improper between free equals.
Nisus and Euryalus’s goals in the raid, too, are distinctly Homeric. They long for glory in battle and for spoils, too, and the latter longing ends up getting them killed. They easily slay many Italians because their opponents are drunk and asleep—perhaps not the most honorable way of doing things—but they are killed specifically because of their hunger for gold. They are spotted not in the heat of battle, but by the glint of Euryalus’s stolen helmet in the dark. This Homeric mode of stripping the armor of the opponent to augment one’s own glory is a deadly character trait for characters in the Aeneid. The warrior girl Camilla will fall because of a similar hunger for spoils, as does Turnus, when Aeneas sees the sword belt he stripped from Pallas.
Despite Nisus and Euryalus’s faults, Virgil is intensely sympathetic to them. Nisus’s desperate panic at losing Euryalus in the chaos of their escape echoes the episode of Aeneas losing track of Creusa during the fall of Troy. Like Aeneas, Nisus’s impulse is to throw himself into battle with an almost suicidal anger, to take vengeance and die gloriously, a very Homeric way of thinking about things. Virgil pays homage to them in a rare moment of authorial intervention, with the sad understanding that these sorts of warriors must be done away with before the founding of the Roman nation. Such uncontrolled passions have no place in Roman society, but Virgil honors them nonetheless. Nisus and Euryalus underline an important theme for the rest of the epic: Virgil encourages us to feel deeply sorry for the losses that the foundation of empire necessitates.
Virgil continues to play with Homeric themes in Turnus’s attack on the Trojan camp. Thematically Turnus is like Hector, in that he is defending his country from a foreign invasion, but he is like Achilles, too, in setting siege to the Trojan camp as the Greeks did to Troy. Aeneas, too, is ambiguously coded: He is like Hector in his devotion to his family and the gods, but in arriving to attack the Italians he is compared to the malignant Dog Star, a simile famously applied to Achilles in the Iliad at the onset of the duel with Hector. Virgil blurs these roles to put the reader in the moral grey area war requires: For him, no one is clearly right or wrong here.
This ambiguity is intensified when Turnus kills Pallas and, pitying him, promises him burial, but Aeneas kills Lausus in a horrible rage, not only denying him mercy, but also mocking his filial piety. Aeneas is only brought back to his humanity when he sees Lausus’s corpse and thinks of his own righteous love for his father, again echoing Achilles’s compassion for king Priam at the end of the Iliad. Virgil uses the relationship between fathers and sons to focalize the intensely personal losses suffered in the war. Even the evil king Mezentius, who delights in mocking the gods, is humanized by his deep sorrow at the death of his son Lausus.
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