Lavinium- Roman LocationLocation · Landmark"Metropolis of the Latins"

The Tables

The prophecy had come as a curse. The Harpy Celaeno told the Trojans they would not found their city until hunger forced them to eat their tables. Years later, on the shore of Latium, the exhausted refugees laid out their food on thin grain platters and ate everything, platters included. Aeneas's son Ascanius laughed: "We are even eating the tables." Aeneas recognized the sign. They had arrived.

King Latinus offered his daughter Lavinia in marriage, and Aeneas traced the city's boundaries with a plough. He named it for his bride. Here the Penates, the sacred images he had carried from burning Troy across the sea, were placed in a shrine for the first time since Troy fell.

The White Sow

Aeneas found her on the riverbank: a great white sow lying with thirty piglets at her teats. The river-god Tiberinus had appeared to him in a dream foretelling this sign, and the seer Helenus had prophesied it at Buthrotum. The thirty piglets meant thirty years. That was how long Lavinium would stand before Ascanius left to found Alba Longa in the Alban Hills.

Aeneas sacrificed the sow and her litter to Juno, who had hunted the Trojans across every sea. Varro records that the sow's body was embalmed in salt and kept at Lavinium as a relic, shown to visitors who came to see where Rome's story began.

The Gods That Would Not Leave

When Ascanius founded Alba Longa thirty years later, he brought the Penates with him. The next morning, the images were back in Lavinium. He moved them again. They returned again. Dionysius and Valerius Maximus both record the miracle. The gods had chosen their home.

Roman consuls and praetors, upon entering office, traveled sixteen miles from Rome to sacrifice at Lavinium's altars. Macrobius and Varro confirm the obligation. Festus records that Roman brides dedicated their childhood garments at its shrines. The Laurentes Lavinates, a priestly college, maintained the ancient rites, and senators counted membership among their honors well into the imperial period.

The River Numicus

After three years as king, Aeneas vanished. He disappeared during a battle against the Rutulians near the River Numicus. His body was never recovered. The Romans said Venus had washed her son in the river, stripping away everything mortal. Ovid describes her anointing what remained with ambrosia, and Aeneas became the god Indiges.

A heroon rose beside the river: a small mound surrounded by trees, bearing the inscription "To the Father and Native God who controls the waters of the Numicus." Roman officials and the people of Lavinium sacrificed there every year. The man who had carried gods across the sea had become a god himself.