Shield of Aeneas
The shield Vulcan, the Roman Hephaestus, forged for Aeneas at the request of his mother Venus, engraved with the future of Rome and described at length at the close of the eighth book of the Aeneid. Its bronze bears the city's destiny: the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, the rape of the Sabine women, Rome's kings, the defence against the Gauls, the punishment of the conspirator Catiline, and the sea battle of Actium with Augustus triumphing over Antony and Cleopatra, all framed within scenes of the empire that was to come. The ekphrasis deliberately answers the Shield of Achilles in Homer