Latinus

King of the Latins on the Tiber-mouth plain, son of Faunus and the nymph Marica (Virg. *Aen.* 7.45–49), grandson of Picus and great-grandson of Saturn — the pre-Trojan stratum of the Italian foundation-legend. An oracle had warned him that his daughter Lavinia must marry a foreign prince whose descendants would raise the Latin name to the stars (7.96–101), and when Aeneas's herald came to the palace Latinus saw the fulfilment and offered Lavinia and a kingdom beside his own (7.255–285). Juno then roused the Rutulian prince Turnus — Lavinia's earlier suitor — into revolt, and Latinus, caught between his oracle and his warrior-aristocracy, withdrew to the palace and let the Italian war run its course (7.600–622). In Livy 1.1.5–1.2.1 the reconciliation after Turnus's death produces the merged Latin-Trojan people under the shared name *Latini*. In a Hesiodic tradition (*Theogony* 1011–1016) Latinus is the son of Odysseus and Circe — an older Greek genealogy that Virgil's Italian version overwrites.

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