In her novel "Lavinia," American author Ursula Le Guin draws on the Aeneid, in which Virgil devotes his most prominent verses to Aeneas's second wife, Lavinia, focusing on her as a prophecy.
On the day before Aeneas's arrival in Latinium, a mysterious fire catches the hair of Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus and Queen Amata, who ruled Latinium in pre-Roman times. Amata loses her two young sons to illness, becomes insane, and insists that Lavinia marry her nephew, Turnus, the crown prince of the neighboring kingdom of Rotalia. But Lavinia hesitates and follows the words of the prophecy.
King Latinus announces that she will marry Aeneas, a stranger newly arrived from Troy, sparking a civil war, and Virgil's hero is destined to establish an empire. According to the author, Lavinia is a story that takes place in a kind of ahistorical mythology, far from the uncertainty of archaeologists in a historical period that is not entirely clear to historians of pre-Roman history.