Latium- Roman LocationLocation · Landmark
Also known as: Lazio
Description
Saturn fled here when Jupiter cast him from heaven, hiding in these Italian hills and teaching mortals agriculture and law, so that the land took its name from latere, 'to lie hidden,' and remembered a Golden Age.
Mythology & Lore
Saturn's Country
When Jupiter seized heaven, Saturn fell. He did not fall into the sea or into darkness. He fell into Italy, into the hills south of the Tiber where the soil was dark and the people had no laws. Virgil puts the story in Evander's mouth: standing on the Palatine, the old Arcadian king points across the river and tells Aeneas what happened there. Saturn arrived as a fugitive god, gathered the scattered hill-people, and gave them agriculture and laws. Under his rule no one locked a door or marked a property line. The land fed everyone equally, and the age took the name Golden.
The region itself took its name from the god's concealment. Ovid and Virgil both derive Latium from latere, to lie hidden, because Saturn lay hidden in these hills from his son's wrath. The etymology was the myth: the place existed because a god needed somewhere to disappear.
What Saturn built did not survive his departure. The Golden Age ended. The people who remained split into quarreling tribes, and by the time Aeneas arrived, Latium was a patchwork of small kingdoms with long memories and short alliances.
Aeneas and the Latin War
Aeneas brought his Trojans to the Tiber mouth, and the land received him with omens. His men ate the flat bread they had been using as plates, fulfilling an old prophecy that they would reach their destination when hunger forced them to eat their tables. King Latinus, who ruled the largest of Latium's kingdoms, had received his own sign: an oracle at Albunea told him his daughter Lavinia must marry a foreigner. He offered her to Aeneas.
Turnus, king of the Rutulians and Lavinia's original betrothed, refused to yield. Juno sent the fury Allecto to ignite his rage, and the war that followed burned across Latium. Virgil gives the conflict the scale of the Trojan War itself: gods fought alongside mortals, and the fields between the hill-towns filled with the dead. Aeneas killed Turnus in the final lines of the Aeneid, and the poem ends there, with the victor standing over the dead and the future of Latium still unwritten.