How happy those whose walls already rise!

The line is spoken in Virgil’s Aeneid during Aeneas’s visit to Carthage. Shipwrecked Trojans arrive at the rising city and Aeneas, still without a settled home, watches the Carthaginians energetically building walls, laying out streets, and raising public works. The exclamation—often rendered in English as “How fortunate…”—captures a moment of poignant contrast: Carthage is already taking shape as a secure civic community, while Aeneas’s people remain exiles, still searching for the destined site of their future city in Italy. The remark also foreshadows the later entanglement between Troy’s survivors and Carthage’s queen, Dido.

On its surface, the quote praises the good fortune of those who can already see their city’s walls rising—an emblem of stability, safety, and collective purpose. In the Aeneid’s larger moral and political frame, walls signify more than architecture: they mark the transition from wandering to civic identity, from vulnerability to ordered community. The line therefore expresses Aeneas’s longing for settlement and the fulfillment of destiny, but it also carries an undertone of envy and grief, since his own people’s “walls” exist only as a promise. Virgil uses the moment to sharpen the epic’s central tension between present hardship and future foundation.