Aeneas married Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus, after winning the war in Italy. Their posthumous son Silvius was born in the forest and became ancestor of the Silvian kings of Alba Longa.
King Latinus and Queen Amata ruled Latium together and were parents of the princess Lavinia, whose hand in marriage became the cause of war between the Trojans and the Latin peoples in Virgil's Aeneid.
Lavinia bore Aeneas's posthumous son Silvius in the woods near Alba Longa, fearing her stepson Ascanius might harm the child. The Silvian dynasty that Silvius founded ruled Alba Longa for generations until Romulus's birth.
Lavinia feared her stepson Ascanius might harm her unborn child Silvius after Aeneas's death, and fled to the woods to give birth in safety. She returned only after reconciliation, and Ascanius ceded no claim against his half-brother.
⚠ Livy (Ab Urbe Condita I.3) follows the tradition of Creusa as Ascanius's mother, making Lavinia his stepmother. Some traditions, including Dionysius of Halicarnassus, make Lavinia the mother of Ascanius.
Faunus prophesied that his granddaughter Lavinia should marry a foreign prince rather than the native Turnus, an oracle that guided Latinus to accept Aeneas as Lavinia's husband.
Aeneas named Lavinium after his wife Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus. Her name immortalized the Latin contribution to Rome's Trojan-Italian origins in the city's very identity.
The Parcae decreed that Lavinia would marry a foreign prince, not the Rutulian Turnus. When Faunus's oracle spoke from the grove of Albunea, it merely voiced what the Fates had already woven into Lavinia's thread.
Lavinia was promised to Turnus before oracles commanded Latinus to wed her to a foreign prince. Her loss to Aeneas became the wound that drove Turnus to war and ultimately to his death.
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