Aeneas

Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Renowned for his pietas and battlefield valor, he was shielded again and again by the gods because fate had decreed his bloodline must survive.
Role in Mythos: The Trojan survivor whose long voyage to Italy founded the line from which Rome would later rise.
Relation to Humans: Aeneas is mortal himself, a leader of refugees and the mythic ancestor claimed by the Roman people and the family of Julius Caesar. His story was held up across antiquity as the model of duty owed to the gods, to one’s father, and to one’s people.

The city was already burning when he hoisted his father onto his back. Smoke poured down the streets of Troy, thick enough to taste, and somewhere behind the falling roofs the Greeks were moving house to house with torches and bronze. Aeneas felt the old man’s weight settle against his shoulders, the small clay household gods clutched in Anchises’ arms because a son with a father to carry has no hands free for anything sacred. His own young boy ran at his side, three quick steps to each of his strides. They went out through the wreck of the only world they had ever known, and the man who carried them would spend the rest of his life looking for somewhere to set them down.

That picture, the warrior bent under the burden of an old man, is the one antiquity could never stop drawing, and it tells you most of what mattered about him. Aeneas was the son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite, whom the Romans called Venus. The stories say she first saw Anchises on the slopes of Mount Ida, where he was tending his cattle, and came down to him disguised as a mortal girl before she let him know what he had done. The child of that night was raised among the mountain nymphs and grew into a kinsman of the Trojan king’s house, cousin to Hector and second only to him among the city’s fighters.

In Homer’s account he is already a marked man. He holds his place in the line of battle, shield locked against shield, the air full of dust and the flat ringing of metal, doing the steady, unglamorous work of a prince defending his walls. When the Greek Diomedes overpowers him and nearly kills him, it is his mother who throws herself between them and carries him off the field, and when she too is wounded the god Apollo finishes the rescue. Later he stands against Achilles himself, hopelessly outmatched, and is lifted clear of the fight in a sudden mist by Poseidon, a god with no love for Troy, who acts only because the threads of fate forbid this particular Trojan to die. A prophecy hung over him: Aeneas and his sons would rule what remained of his people. He was not the greatest warrior on that field, and everyone knew it. He was the one who was meant to live.

So when Troy fell he lived, and the living was its own long punishment. He gathered the survivors, the Aeneads, loaded them onto ships, and put out into a sea that seemed determined to keep them moving. They touched at Thrace and found murder in its soil, at Delos and Crete chasing half-understood oracles, and on the Strophades the harpy Celaeno rose shrieking over their meal to spit a prophecy of hunger at them. Anchises died in Sicily, and the father his son had carried out of the flames was buried in foreign ground. Then a storm broke the fleet apart and drove the survivors onto the coast of Africa, to the new city of Carthage and its queen.

Dido took him in, and Venus, never one to leave her son’s fortunes to chance, sent Cupid to kindle the queen’s heart until she loved him past all reason. For a season Aeneas forgot the sea and the prophecy both. He stayed, he built, he played at being a king who had arrived somewhere. Then Mercury came down with a message from Jupiter that was less a request than a sentence: this was not his city, and he was to go. He went. From the deck of his departing ship he could see the smoke of a great fire rising over Carthage, and he did not know, or made himself not know, that it was Dido’s pyre, that she had climbed onto it with the sword he had left behind and cursed his descendants and hers to eternal war before she fell on the blade.

Italy still lay ahead, and the dead lay between. At Cumae the Sibyl led him down through the cold mouth of the underworld, the golden bough gleaming in his fist as a passport for the living. He crossed the black river in Charon’s boat, slipped past the three throats of Cerberus, and walked among the shades until he found his father again. Anchises showed him a slow procession of souls not yet born, the kings and heroes of a Rome that did not yet exist, and sent him back up into the light with the weight of all of them added to his pack.

The last war was in Latium. King Latinus would have given him his daughter Lavinia and a peaceful share of the land, but she had been promised to Turnus, prince of the Rutulians, and Turnus did not intend to give her up. The fighting that followed cost Aeneas the young Pallas, son of his ally Evander, a boy he had sworn to protect. When the two leaders finally met in single combat and Turnus lay beaten and begging for his life, Aeneas hesitated. He was ready to spare him. Then he saw the swordbelt Turnus had stripped from Pallas’s body and was wearing as a trophy, and the hesitation burned off in an instant. He drove the blade home in fury, and the poem ends there, with the soul of his enemy fleeing down to the shades and no neat word spoken over it.

His gifts were never quite his own. The strength that made him formidable was matched by men who beat him, and what truly preserved him was favor: a divine mother, gods who intervened, a fate that needed him alive. His real power was endurance, the capacity to keep carrying what he was given, father and son and city and prophecy, long past the point where a lesser man would have set it all down. That same dutifulness was his limit. He had almost no freedom; his life ran on rails laid by the gods, and the people who loved him along the way, Creusa lost in the burning streets, Dido on her pyre, Turnus in the dust, paid for a destiny that was never theirs. The man famous for piety ends his story with a killing done in rage, and the stories let the contradiction stand.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Aeneas?

Aeneas was a Trojan hero of Greek and Roman mythology, the son of the prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (Venus). He survived the fall of Troy and led a band of refugees to Italy, where he founded the bloodline from which the Romans traced their origins. Virgil made him the central figure of the Aeneid, Rome’s national epic.

Who were the parents of Aeneas?

Aeneas was the son of Anchises, a prince of the Trojan royal house, and the goddess Aphrodite, known to the Romans as Venus. According to myth, Aphrodite seduced Anchises while he was herding cattle on Mount Ida and later revealed she was a goddess. This divine parentage is why the gods repeatedly intervened to protect Aeneas.

Why is Aeneas important to Rome?

Aeneas is the legendary ancestor of the Roman people. After escaping Troy he settled in Latium and founded the city of Lavinium, and his son Ascanius (also called Iulus) founded Alba Longa, the line that led to Romulus and Remus. The family of Julius Caesar and the emperor Augustus claimed direct descent from Aeneas through Iulus.

What happened between Aeneas and Dido?

Dido, the queen of Carthage, fell deeply in love with Aeneas after the goddess Venus sent Cupid to inflame her heart. Aeneas lingered with her until Jupiter ordered him to sail on to Italy and fulfill his destiny. When he left, Dido killed herself on a funeral pyre with the sword he had left behind, cursing his descendants and seeding the legendary enmity between Rome and Carthage.

How does the story of Aeneas end?

The Aeneid ends with Aeneas in single combat against Turnus, the Rutulian prince who was his rival for the hand of Lavinia. Aeneas defeats Turnus and is about to spare him, but then sees that Turnus is wearing the swordbelt taken from Pallas, a young ally Aeneas had failed to protect. Enraged, Aeneas kills him, and the poem closes on that act with no further resolution.