Amata- Roman FigureMortal"Queen of Latium"

Opposition to Aeneas

Amata had chosen Turnus for her daughter long before the Trojans arrived. He was Rutulian, royal, a proven warrior. When Latinus received oracles declaring that Lavinia must marry a foreign prince, Amata argued against it. She reminded the king that Turnus's ancestry traced back to Greek Argos, foreign enough to satisfy any prophecy. Latinus would not bend. Virgil gives her words in the seventh book of the Aeneid: a mother pleading, then demanding, then threatening.

Allecto's Madness

Juno sent the Fury Allecto to make certain that persuasion failed. Allecto came to Amata first. She drew a serpent from her own hair and slipped it into the queen's breast, where it coiled beneath the skin and worked its venom into her blood. At first Amata appeared only more insistent, still arguing with Latinus in the language of reason. Then the poison took hold.

She seized Lavinia and ran. Out of the palace, out of the city, into the forests. She cried out that Bacchus alone was worthy of her daughter and whirled through the trees in the manner of a maenad. Other Latin mothers followed, loosening their hair and abandoning their homes. The woods filled with women. Amata had become something the court could no longer contain.

The Rope

The war she had helped kindle burned through Latium. When the final battle came and no word arrived from Turnus, Amata believed him dead. She called herself the cause of every death, every burned field, every mother's grief. In the palace, she knotted her purple robe into a noose and hanged herself from a high beam. Lavinia found her. She tore at her own cheeks and screamed, and the palace erupted in lamentation. The sound carried to the walls, where the Latins still fighting heard it and knew something worse than defeat had happened inside.