Aborigines and Trojans were soon afterward the joint objects of a hostile attack.  Turnus, king of the Rutulians, to whom Lavinia had been affianced before the arrival of AEneas, indignant that a stranger had been preferred to himself, had made war on AEneas and Latinus together.  Neither army came out of the struggle with satisfaction.  The Rutulians were vanquished:  the victorious Aborigines and Trojans lost their leader Latinus.  Thereupon Turnus and the Rutulians, mistrustful of their strength, had recourse to the prosperous and powerful Etruscans, and their king Mezentius, whose seat of government was at Caere, at that time a flourishing town.  Even from the outset he had viewed with dissatisfaction the founding of a new city, and, as at that time he considered that the Trojan power was increasing far more than was altogether consistent with the safety of the neighbouring peoples, he readily joined his forces in alliance with the Rutulians.  AEneas, to gain the good-will of the Aborigines in face of a war so serious and alarming, and in order that they might all be not only under the same laws but might also bear the same name, called both nations Latins.  In fact, subsequently, the Aborigines were not behind the Trojans in zeal and loyalty toward their king AEneas.  Accordingly, in full reliance on this state of mind of the two nations, who were daily becoming more and more united, and in spite of the fact that Etruria was so powerful, that at this time it had filled with the fame of its renown not only the land but the sea also, throughout the whole length of Italy from the Alps to the Sicilian Strait, AEneas led out his forces into the field, although he might have repelled their attack by means of his fortifications.  Thereupon a battle was fought, in which victory rested with the Latins, but for AEneas it was even the last of his acts on earth.  He, by whatever name laws human and divine demand he should be called, was buried on the banks of the river Numicus:  they call him Jupiter Indiges.

Ascanius, the son of AEneas, was not yet old enough to rule; the government, however, remained unassailed for him till he reached the age of maturity.  In the interim, under the regency of a woman—­so great was Lavinia’s capacity—­the Latin state and the boy’s kingdom, inherited from his father and grandfather, was secured for him.  I will not discuss the question—­for who can state as certain a matter of such antiquity?—­whether it was this Ascanius, or one older than he, born of Creusa, before the fall of Troy, and subsequently the companion of his father’s flight, the same whom, under the name of Iulus, the Julian family represents to be the founder of its name.  Be that as it may, this Ascanius, wherever born and of whatever mother—­it is at any rate agreed that his father was AEneas—­seeing that Lavinium was over-populated, left that city, now a flourishing and wealthy one, considering those times, to his mother or stepmother, and built himself a new one at the foot of the Alban mount, which, from its situation, being built all along the ridge of a hill, was called Alba Longa.