Aeneas

Aeneas is the son of Aphrodite and the Trojan prince Anchises. The Iliad says the goddess conceived him while Anchises tended his cattle on the slopes of Mount Ida, and Hesiod's Theogony also sets the birth on the peaks of Ida. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells the affair from her side. After their night together she promises Anchises a son who will reign among the Trojans, with children's children after him. She names the boy Aeneas from the awful grief she felt at sharing a mortal's bed. Mountain nymphs will rear him, and she warns Anchises never to boast of her, or Zeus will strike him with a thunderbolt.

Aeneas belongs to the younger branch of Troy's royal house. Facing Achilles in Iliad Book 20, he recites his descent from Dardanus, son of Zeus. Tros had three sons: Ilus, Assaracus and Ganymede. Ilus's line runs to Priam and Hector, Assaracus's to Capys, Anchises and Aeneas himself. In the Iliad he leads the Dardanians. The seer Helenus tells Aeneas and Hector that the war-toil of the Trojans rests on them above all others. Yet in Book 13 Aeneas hangs back at the rear, angry at Priam, who never honoured him for all his bravery.

The gods save him twice in the Iliad. In Book 5, Diomedes crushes his hip with a boulder, and Aphrodite wraps her son in her robe to carry him from the fighting. Diomedes wounds her wrist and she drops him. Apollo then hides Aeneas in a dark cloud and beats Diomedes back three times before warning him off. He carries Aeneas to his temple on Pergamus, where Leto and Artemis heal him, and leaves a phantom of Aeneas for the armies to fight over. The episode belongs to the larger Trojan War.

In Book 20, Apollo urges Aeneas to face Achilles. Achilles taunts him with hoping for Priam's throne and reminds him how he once fled from his cattle on Ida. Aeneas's spear stops in the gold layer of Achilles's divine shield, and Achilles's spear drives through Aeneas's shield. Poseidon then tells the gods that Aeneas is fated to escape, so that the race of Dardanus will not die out. Zeus has come to hate Priam's line, he says, and Aeneas and his sons' sons will be kings among the Trojans. Poseidon pours mist over Achilles's eyes and flings Aeneas to the far edge of the battle.

The accounts of his escape from Troy differ. Apollodorus says he took up his father Anchises and fled, and the Greeks let him alone because of his piety. Livy says the Greeks spared Aeneas and Antenor, from old ties of hospitality and because both had always urged peace and the return of Helen. In Virgil's Aeneid, Hector's ghost tells him to flee with Troy's household gods and Vesta's undying fire. He carries Anchises on his shoulders, Anchises holds the sacred images, and his small son Iulus walks at his side. His wife Creusa falls behind in the dark and is lost. Her ghost tells him that the Great Mother of the gods keeps her in that land. Ovid's Metamorphoses also has him carry the holy images and his father, with his son Ascanius.

The Aeneid makes him the hero of Rome's national epic. Juno's anger drives storms against his fleet, which lands at Carthage. There he becomes the lover of Queen Dido, until Jupiter sends Mercury to order him on. He tells Dido it is not his own free choice that seeks Italy, and she curses him. At Cumae he vows a marble temple to Phoebus and his sister (Aeneid 6.69-74). In the underworld he meets her shade and weeps, but she turns away from him in anger. He also finds Anchises in the blessed groves, where his father shows him the souls of his future descendants. In Italy he wins Lavinia and ends the poem by killing Turnus in single combat, after seeing the belt Turnus stripped from the young Pallas.

Livy tells the Italian story as history, and admits two versions of its start. Aeneas sails by way of Macedonia and Sicily to the Laurentine coast. In one tradition King Latinus is beaten in battle and then makes peace; in the other he offers friendship before any fighting. Either way Aeneas marries Latinus's daughter and founds Lavinium, naming it after her. Turnus, king of the Rutulians, had been betrothed to her and goes to war. Latinus dies in the fighting. Aeneas then names Trojans and natives alike Latins and wins a last battle against Turnus's Etruscan ally Mezentius.

His end is told as a disappearance more than a death. Livy says the victory over the Etruscans was his last mortal act, and that his tomb stands on the bank of the Numicius, where he is addressed as Jupiter Indiges. Livy hedges even there, calling him whatever it is right to call him. Ovid makes the change explicit. Venus asks Jupiter to give her son a godhead, the river Numicius washes away every mortal part of him, and she anoints him with nectar and ambrosia. The people then name him Indiges. This is an apotheosis, and Virgil's Jupiter promises it in Aeneid Book 1: Venus will bear Aeneas up to the stars.

The sources also disagree about his son. In Virgil, Ascanius is the boy from Troy, renamed Iulus, and Jupiter traces from him a line through Alba Longa and Romulus to Julius Caesar. Livy says Lavinia bore Aeneas a son named Ascanius in Italy. He then declines to decide whether the Iulus claimed by the Julian family was that boy or an older son born to Creusa at Troy. Livy agrees that Ascanius founded Alba Longa, thirty years after Lavinium.

The Greek and Roman pictures of Aeneas do not fully match. The Iliad promises that he and his descendants will rule among the Trojans, and says nothing about Italy. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite makes the same promise of a son and descendants reigning among the Trojans. Italy, Lavinium and Rome come from later writers, above all Virgil and Livy. The fuller Roman story is traced across the Trojan Cycle and its aftermath.