Prayer to Earth and the Penates

The Trojans, landed in Italy, have eaten the bread trenchers off which they dined, and the prophecy is fulfilled: they know the wandering is over. Aeneas greets the land.

This is not a request but a greeting, and therefore the shortest possible resolution of the longest possible plot: hic domus, haec patria est, here is home, here is our country. Seven years and six books end in half a line of verse.

Fatis mihi debita tellus — land owed to me by the fates. Debita, "owed", is the word of a debt obligation. Italy is neither granted nor conquered: it is due, and Aeneas addresses it as a creditor arrived to collect. The war that follows in the poem is a dispute over enforcement.

The Penates are greeted on equal terms with the land, and the order matters: the gods were carried here, the land was found; a home is what results from joining the two. The Roman idea of a native country rests neither on a place nor on a holy thing but on their coincidence.

There was a substitution here. The card formerly carried the line Salve, o parens, Tellus, et tu ne desere nostros — a line that does not occur in Virgil at all. It has been replaced with the genuine text of Aeneid 7.120-122.