Aeneid, Book 8

Book 8 of the Aeneid, Vergil's epic of Rome's beginnings (29–19 BC), is the book in which the story comes closest to Rome itself. With Latium in arms against him, Aeneas goes upriver to seek help from Evander, a Greek king from Arcadia whose small town of Pallanteum stands on the hill that will become the Palatine.

The river-god Tiber appears to Aeneas in a dream, and the white sow with her thirty piglets confirms the prophecy. Evander's son Pallas meets the Trojans at a festival of Hercules, and Evander tells how Hercules killed the fire-breathing monster Cacus, who had stolen his cattle and hidden them in a cave on the Aventine. Then Evander walks Aeneas round the site of the future city, past the Carmental gate, the Lupercal, the Tarpeian rock and the Capitol, while cattle graze in what will be the Forum. Venus persuades her husband Vulcan to make arms for her son, and the Cyclopes forge them. Evander sends Pallas with Aeneas and directs him to the Etruscans, who have risen against Mezentius. Venus brings the arms, and the book ends with the shield, on which Roman history is shown from Romulus and Remus to Augustus' victory at Actium and his triple triumph of 29 BC.

This is the most patriotic book of the poem and an essential text for the Augustan view of Rome. The Hercules and Cacus episode and the shield are famous set pieces, and the Latin is rich in names and allusion.