nds.
Thereupon a treaty was concluded between the chiefs, and mutual
greetings passed between the armies: AEneas was hospitably entertained
at the house of Latinus; there Latinus, in the presence of his
household gods, cemented the public league by a family one, by giving
AEneas his daughter in marriage. This event fully confirmed the Trojans
in the hope of at length terminating their wanderings by a lasting and
permanent settlement. They built a town, which AEneas called Lavinium
after the name of his wife. Shortly afterward also, a son was the
issue of the recently concluded marriage, to whom his parents gave the
name of Ascanius.

Aborigines and Trojans were soon afterward the joint objects of a
hostile attack. Turnus, king of the Rutulians, to whom Lavinia had
been affianced before the arrival of AEneas, indignant that a stranger
had been preferred to himself, had made war on AEneas and Latinus
together. Neither army came out of the struggle with satisfaction. The
Rutulians were vanquished: the victorious Aborigines and Trojans lost
their leader Latinus. Thereupon Turnus and the Rutulians, mistrustful
of their strength, had recourse to the prosperous and powerful
Etruscans, and their king Mezentius, whose seat of government was at
Caere, at that time a flourishing town. Even from the outset he had
viewed with dissatisfaction the founding of a new city, and, as at
that time he considered that the Trojan power was increasing far more
than was altogether consistent with the safety of the neighbouring
peoples, he readily joined his forces in alliance with the Rutulians.
AEneas, to gain the good-will of the Aborigines in face of a war so
serious and alarming, and in order that they might all be not only
under the same laws but might also bear the same name, called both
nations Latins. In fact, subsequently, the Aborigines were not behind
the Trojans in zeal and loyalty toward their king AEneas. Accordingly,
in full reliance on this state of mind of the two nations, who were
daily becoming more and more united, and in spite of the fact that
Etruria was so powerful, that at this time it had filled with the fame
of its renown not only the land but the sea also, throughout the whole
length of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian Strait, AEneas led out
his forces into the field, although he might have repelled their
attack by means of his fortifications. Thereupon a battle was fought,
in which victory rested with the Latins,