Lavinia

Content Warning: This section discusses child death.

The characters in Lavinia all have the opportunity to accept or resist their fates. Amata chooses again and again to resist, starting when her young sons die. She can’t accept their deaths, so she becomes cruel and unpredictable instead of settling into her role as queen. She tries to force Lavinia to marry Turnus despite all orders and omens forbidding the match. Her desire to control her own life complicates the plot but also demonstrates a certain strength. Like Amata, Turnus wants to resist fate, ignoring omens and Latinus’s explicit decrees that Turnus will never marry Lavinia. At the end of his life, Turnus changes, accepting his fate in surrendering to Aeneas. This decision makes Turnus a more sympathetic character in his final moments.

Lavinia generally accepts her fate, even though she knows that she must mourn Aeneas’s death after only three years of their marriage. She asks Aeneas once to give up his crown but immediately after making this request feels guilty for trying to change fate. Aeneas is likewise prepared to accept his fate, as he has been ever since the Trojan War. He followed Creusa’s instruction to go west, even when accepting his fate meant leaving Dido. Of course, because Lavinia and Aeneas live inside a poem, it doesn’t ultimately matter whether they resist fate; it will come for them anyway. This idea is characteristically Greek: Those who attempt to thwart a prophecy invariably meet their fates regardless. By emphasizing this common Greek idea, the poet Virgil (or Vergil) created a stronger link between Greek and Roman cultures, which was part of the nation-building purpose of the Aeneid.

Several times in the novel, Lavinia references the Fates, describing them as three old women. In Greek and Roman myth, the Fates measure each person’s life along a spool of thread, cutting the thread when an individual is fated to die. The poet tells Lavinia that Aeneas will rule for three years, and he dies exactly three years to the day after arriving in Latium. Lavinia laments the unforgiving nature of the Fates, noting, “The three old women who spin and cut the thread had measured exactly, to the inch, nothing to spare” (158). Generally, characters in Lavinia who accept their fate leave a better legacy, both because fate is inescapable and because accepting it is more pious than resisting. Nevertheless, even characters who accept fate can’t escape its tragic and painful consequences.