The Gates of War are, in the Aeneid, both a metaphor and a real, physical set of doors in Lavinium. (The Rome of Virgil's time also had physical Gates of War, which they closed, with much festivity, at the end of wars. Augustus famously closed the gates three times in his reign, more than they had ever been shut in Roman history.) The Gates are part of the temple of Janus, a two-faced god of beginnings and endings. When the war of the Trojans against the Latins begins, Latinus doesn't want to open the gates of war in Lavinium, so Juno does it for him. The Gates connect Rome's mythological past to the time of Augustus, and graphically demonstrate the extent of Juno's meddling.