Practice Exam Set: Aeneid X Lines 63–78

Juno answers Venus, and her opening move is pure rhetorical aggression: mock indignation, delivered at speed. Who compelled this confrontation? Not her. Did Juno force Aeneas to leave Troy, trust his life to the wind, abandon his camp, leave Ascanius behind walls while he sailed north to recruit allies? She turns every element of Venus's complaint back on its source. Aeneas made his own choices. Aeneas came to Italy on the authority of fate and Cassandra — very well. But fate did not tell him to do any of the things that have since gone wrong.

The argument pivots sharply to Turnus. He is not an aggressor — he is a king defending his own land, with the goddess Venilia for a mother and the demigod Pilumnus for an ancestor. The Trojans arrived uninvited, seized territory that was not theirs, and began stealing the brides of men who had prior claim. In Juno's framing, the moral positions of the entire war are reversed: the Trojans are the invaders, the Rutulians the defenders, and Venus's complaint is the grievance of a side that started the fight and now resents the resistance.

The speech is Virgil at his most morally uncomfortable — Juno's argument is wrong in its conclusions but disturbingly coherent in its logic.