cities

• Rome itself is referred to explicitly
• book 1 - Aeneas tells his men 'the kingdom of Troy shall rise again'
• book 1 - Jupiter tells Venus about the 'walls of Mars' which Romulus will build
• book 2 - Hector instructs Aeneas to 'look for a great city to establish'
• book 2 - Creusa tells him to go 'where the Lydian Thybris flows'
• book 4 - Aeneas explains to Dido that he must go to Italy to found a race, even though he would rather return home and rebuild Troy
• book 6 - the Sibyl talks of the Tiber foaming with blood, in a reference to the war with the Latins
• book 8 - Aeneas' visit to Pallanteum embodies the theme of new cities
• Pallenteum is on the site of the future Rome, providing familiar topographical and cultural references to the city
• cultural references: the Capitol, Aventine, Carmental Gate, Asylum, Lupercal, House of Tarpeia
• Virgil makes a comparison with Augustan Rome: there were cattle everywhere, lowing in the forum and the 'now luxurious district of the Carinae'
• the shield shows Rome, in particular, the temple of Apollo
• there are possible allusions to Rome throughout the narrative
• the head of a horse found when Carthage was being built (bk 1) perhaps alludes to the foundation myth that a head was found buried on the Capitol in Rome
• the ghostly heroes exercising in the Elysian Fields in book 6, 642-644, and the men in Latinus' city, 'training chariot teams in clouds of dust' (bk 7), recall the Campus Marts of Augustan Rome
• book 6 - Aeneas pronounces that he will 'build a temple to Phoebus and Diana'
• Octavian himself had built a temple to Apollo on the Palatine, and moved the Sibylline books there