Aeneas

• 1. Introduction

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  Aeneas was twice pulled back from death by gods who would not let him die. In Homer's Iliad, Aphrodite and Apollo snatch him from a duel with Diomedes of Argos, who nearly kills him, and carry him to Pergamos for healing. Later Poseidon, a god who usually favors the Greeks, rescues him from Achilles, explaining that this warrior is destined to rule the Trojan people. The reason kept showing up across centuries of writing. He was the son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the Greek goddess Aphrodite, the figure the Romans called Venus. In Homer he is only a minor character, a third cousin of Hector and Paris. Yet he would become the first true hero of Rome. How does a junior warrior in someone else's epic end up the ancestor of an empire? Why did Romans, medieval English chroniclers, and a Norse mythographer all reach for the same Trojan? And what did the gods see in him that the listener has not yet been told?

• 2. A Name Born From Grief

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  Aphrodite gives Aeneas his name in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, and she does it out of pain. The name comes from the adjective ainon, meaning terrible, for the terrible grief he caused her by being born mortal, a child who would age and die. It is a popular etymology, one Homer seems to exploit in the Iliad. Medieval writers offered a stranger reading. Because the Aeneid was written by a philosopher, some held, it should be read philosophically. In that natural order, the name combined the Greek ennos, meaning dweller, with demas, meaning body, yielding ennaios, the in-dweller. Aeneas became a god inhabiting a mortal body. The source is honest about the limits here. There is no certainty regarding the origin of his name. What is certain is that the question of who Aeneas really was, mortal or something more, was baked into his name from the start.

• 3. The Weight Of Pius

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  Virgil hands Aeneas two epithets that no Homeric hero carries: pater and pius. Where Homer's Odysseus is poikilios, wily, Virgil's Aeneas is pius, pious, a word carrying a strong moral tone. The choice marks a deliberate break from Homer. Virgil also borrows Homeric epithets in imitation of the Iliad, among them Anchisiades, magnanimum, magnus, heros, and bonus. The two original ones do the heavy work. Their use is circumstantial rather than constant. Aeneas calls himself pius only when praying, and the author applies it only when the character acts on behalf of the gods to fulfill his divine mission. He is named pater, father, when acting in the interest of his men. Pius connotes reverence toward the gods and dutifulness to family. Scholars still argue over how genuine the word is inside the poem, and whether Virgil sometimes deploys it with sarcasm.

• 4. How A Demigod Was Made

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  Aphrodite, in the Homeric Hymn, never wanted to love a mortal. Zeus punished her for making the gods fall for mortal women by planting in her a desire for Prince Anchises, who was tending cattle in the hills near Mount Ida. Smitten at the sight of him, she adorned herself as if for a wedding among the gods and appeared before him, claiming to be a Phrygian princess. After they made love she revealed her true identity, and Anchises grew afraid. She promised him protection and a son to be called Aeneas, on one condition: he must never tell anyone he had lain with a goddess. The child was handed to the nymphs of Mount Ida, who raised him to age five before returning him to his father. Anchises did not keep the secret. By other accounts he bragged of the encounter, and Zeus struck him in the foot with a thunderbolt, leaving him lame. That wound would matter when Troy burned, because Aeneas had to carry his father from the flames.

• 5. The Sole Survivor Pattern

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  Pseudo-Apollodorus, in his Bibliotheca, writes that the Greeks spared Aeneas alone, on account of his piety. The detail places him inside a recognizable pattern. The scholar Bruce Louden presents Aeneas as an archetype: the sole virtuous individual or family spared from general destruction. He sits alongside Utnapishtim, alongside Baucis and Philemon, alongside Noah and Lot, the figures who walk out of a doomed world. His honor on the battlefield is earned, not merely granted. Aggrieved with Priam for being denied his due share of honor despite brave deeds, Aeneas had held back from the fighting, then led an attack against Idomeneus to recover the body of his brother-in-law Alcathous at the urging of Deiphobus. The Roman mythographer Gaius Julius Hyginus credits him with killing 28 enemies in the Trojan War. Heinrich Schliemann thought it extremely probable that, when Homer visited the Troad, the King of Troy claimed his race descended in a direct line from Aeneas.

• 6. The Long Road To Italy

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  Twelve books of Virgil's Aeneid carry Aeneas from a burning city to the founding of Lavinium. Commanded by the gods to flee, he gathered a band called the Aeneads and sailed for Italy to become a progenitor of the Romans. The company is named with care: his trumpeter Misenus, his father Anchises, his friends Achates, Sergestus, and Acmon, the healer Iapyx, the helmsman Palinurus, and his son Ascanius. He carried the Lares and Penates, the household gods of Troy, and transplanted them to Italy. On Sicily, in Drepanum on the western coast, Anchises died peacefully. After a storm raised at Juno's request, Aeneas reached Carthage following six years of wandering. There he had a year-long affair with the Carthaginian queen Dido, who offered to share her land and her throne. Juno arranged a marriage of sorts, having been warned her favorite city would one day fall to Trojan descendants. Then Jupiter sent the messenger god Mercury to remind Aeneas of his purpose and force him to leave in secret. Dido cursed Carthage to forever oppose Rome, an enmity that would culminate in the Punic Wars, then killed herself with the sword Aeneas had given her, on a pyre piled with his gifts.

• 7. From Mortal To Indiges

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  Latinus, king of the Latins, welcomed the exiled Trojans into Latium. His daughter Lavinia had been promised to Turnus, king of the Rutuli, but a prophecy named a stranger as her husband, and Latinus chose to obey it. Turnus declared war at Juno's urging, allied with King Mezentius of the Etruscans and Queen Amata of the Latins. Aeneas's forces prevailed and Turnus was killed, at which point Virgil's account ends abruptly. The rest comes from other ancient sources. According to Livy, Aeneas won but Latinus died in the war, and Aeneas founded the city of Lavinium, named for his wife. After his death Venus asked Jupiter to make her son immortal, and Jupiter agreed. The river god Numicus washed away all his mortal parts, Venus anointed him with ambrosia and nectar, and he became the god Jupiter Indiges. The grief that named him at birth had run its course. The mortal who would age and die was finally beyond both.

• 8. An Ancestor For Empires

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  The Julian family of Rome, including Julius Caesar and Augustus, traced their lineage through Ascanius and Aeneas back to the goddess Venus. Ascanius, also called Iulus, founded Alba Longa and began a long line of kings. Through their mother Rhea Silvia, the twins Romulus and Remus descend from Aeneas, making him progenitor of the Roman people. The arithmetic forced a fix. Once the fall of Troy was dated to 1184 BCE and the founding of Rome to 753 BCE, authors added generations to bridge the gap, where earlier sources had called Aeneas the twins' father or grandfather. The bloodline reached further than Rome. The Brut Chronicle tells of Britain's settling by Brutus of Troy, son of Aeneas, and the legendary British kings, including King Arthur, traced their family through this grandson. In the Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson identifies Aeneas with the Norse god Vidarr of the Aesir, and elsewhere likens a Trojan named Munon, whose tale resembles the Aeneid, to lineage reaching Thor. Belief in the British descent was once widespread, and only began to fade by the time of the Renaissance.