Aeneas is the Trojan hero of the Iliad who, in the Aeneid, becomes the founder of the Roman race. He is the son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite, a second-generation Trojan whose destiny, declared from his birth, was to survive the destruction of Troy and to lead his people to a new homeland in the west. The story exists in two very different forms. In the Greek tradition — the Iliad, the Cypria, the Aethiopis, and the Iliou Persis of the Epic Cycle — Aeneas is a competent but secondary hero, and the reason for his survival at Troy is variously given. In the Roman tradition — above all in Virgil’s Aeneid (29–19 BCE), the great national epic of Rome — Aeneas is the embodiment of pietas, the Roman virtue of duty to the gods, the family, and the state, and his journey is the founding myth of the Roman people. The two traditions are not the same story, and the Aeneid is not a translation of any Greek source. It is a Roman foundation epic, written in the generation after the Battle of Actium (31 BCE), in which the Julian house of Augustus traced its descent from Aeneas’s son Iulus, and it is poems in the Western tradition.
Aeneas in the Greek Tradition
In the Iliad, Aeneas is a Lycian ally of the Trojans, leading the Dardanian contingent. He is a serious warrior but not in the first rank: he does not face Achilles in single combat in the Iliad, and Poseidon, in Book XX, takes the unusual step of saving him from certain death, on the grounds that Aeneas is destined to survive the war and to rule over the Trojans of the new generation. The Greek tradition was uncertain why Aeneas should be so important, and there are at least three different stories. The Cypria, the first poem of the Epic Cycle, makes the Trojans’ fate the subject of a weighing of fates in Book VIII of the Iliad, in which Zeus lifts the balance and Aeneas’s side of the scale goes down — meaning Aeneas, the Trojans, will lose. The implication is that the Trojans will be defeated, but Aeneas himself will survive. The standard genealogy, from Hesiod’s Catalogue of Women and elsewhere, makes Aeneas’s son Aeneadas the founder of the later dynasty that the Romans traced from Aeneas and Iulus.
The Fall of Troy and the Flight
The Aeneid opens at the moment of Troy’s fall. Aeneas, with his father Anchises on his back, his son Ascanius (Iulus) by the hand, and his wife Creusa following behind, escapes the burning city. The famous scene in Book II, in which Aeneas sees the ghost of Creusa, who has been left behind in the panic, and is told by her to press on, is one of the central images of Roman literature: the loss of the wife, the loss of the city, the carrying of the father on the back, and the small son leading the way. The scene has been reproduced in painting (Bernini, Rubens, Tiepolo) and in sculpture (Canova’s Creugas and Damoxenus is not this, but the trope is everywhere) for three centuries.
After Troy, Aeneas and his small band of survivors set out in a fleet of twenty ships. They make a long Mediterranean voyage, touching at Thrace, at Delos, at Crete, at the Strophades, at Epirus, at Sicily, and at Cumae, where the Sibyl guides Aeneas through the underworld. The voyage is the central narrative of Books I–VI of the Aeneid, and it is shaped to parallel the wanderings of Odysseus in the Odyssey, with a different emotional register: Aeneas is not trying to return home, he is trying to found a new one.
The Affair with Dido
In Carthage, Aeneas falls in love with Queen Dido, who has also fled her home (Tyre, in Phoenicia) and who is building a new city on the North African coast. The affair is the central narrative of Book IV. Virgil’s Dido is not the simple seductress of later Roman and medieval legend, but a serious figure — a queen, a founder, a woman of dignity — and the tragedy of the story is that her dignity is precisely what is destroyed by Aeneas’s departure. Aeneas must leave: the gods, particularly Jupiter and Mercury, remind him that his destiny is Italy, not Carthage. He leaves. Dido kills herself on a pyre. The affair is the model for the medieval love-tragedies of Dido and Aeneas, and it is one of the great love-stories of European literature. The pity of the Aeneid, Virgil says in the famous first line of Book I, is that Aeneas had to suffer so much, and the pity of Book IV is the reverse, that Dido did.
The Underworld
In Book VI, Aeneas descends to the underworld, guided by the Sibyl of Cumae, to visit the ghost of his father Anchises. The journey is modelled on the eleventh book of the Odyssey and on the katabasis of Heracles, but the Roman poet turns it into a national myth. Anchises shows Aeneas the future of Rome: the parade of heroes who will come from his line, ending in Augustus. The scene is the most political passage in the Aeneid, and it is the moment in which the Roman national myth is most explicitly tied to the Julian house. The speech of Anchises — “Roman, remember by your strength to rule / the peoples of the earth” — became a textbook quotation in the Latin grammar schools of the imperial period, and it remained a key text for European political thought for two thousand years.
The War in Italy and the Death of Aeneas
In Books VII–XII, Aeneas reaches the Italian coast (near modern Cumae, the site of the Sibyl’s cave), and the Latins, led by King Latinus, offer him a place to settle. The local war of the Trojans against the Latins (and, in Book X, the Etruscans and the Latin allies) is the subject of the second half of the Aeneid, and ends with the death of Turnus, the Rutulian champion, in single combat with Aeneas in Book XII. Aeneas is the founder of the Latin race by a different route: Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, is his second wife, and the line that will become Rome is descended from her. The Aeneid ends abruptly after the death of Turnus, and the death of Aeneas is not told in the poem. In later Roman tradition, Aeneas is said to have been deified, becoming the god Indiges, and his son Silvius founded the line of Alba Longa, from which Romulus and Remus would later come.
Aeneas in the Visual Arts
The Aeneid is one of the great sources of European painting. The cycle of Aeneas’s wanderings and of the fall of Troy was painted by the major Italian masters of the Renaissance and Baroque — by Federico Barocci, by Domenichino, by Rubens (the famous Aeneas and Anchises, in which the old man leans heavily on the young hero’s shoulder, is a set-piece of the Flemish Baroque), and by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Bernini made the central scene in sculpture (a small Aeneas and Anchises group is in the Borghese Gallery in Rome). The scenes of Aeneas’s encounter with Dido, the descent into the underworld, and the death of Turnus are part of the standard European iconographic repertoire.
Aeneas in Modern Literature
The Aeneas story is the source of the great Virgilian tradition in English literature, from Chaucer and the Roman de Troie through the Renaissance (Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus draws on it, and the Virgilian tag quos ego — “whom I” — became a literary shorthand for the suppressed wrath of a sea-god) to the modern period. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land takes Aeneas’s journey to the underworld as one of its central images, and Ezra Pound’s Cantos are an extended meditation on the Aeneid. The modern reception of Aeneas is in some ways even more important than the original: every modern narrative of a hero’s long journey to found a new state — from the Star Wars prequels to Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed — is in some sense a working-out of the Aeneid.
A Note on Reading the Myth
The Aeneas story is the clearest case on this site of how a Greek myth was rebuilt by a later culture to serve its own political needs. The Greek Aeneas is a competent but minor hero, and the Iliad does not give him a clear destiny. The Roman Aeneas is the founder of Rome, the embodiment of pietas, the ancestor of Augustus. Both readings are true to the texts. The Aeneid is a poem about the difficult cost of founding a state — the cost in love, in the lives of one’s companions, in the loss of the wife at Troy and the lover at Carthage — and the cost is what makes Aeneas, in the Roman reading, a great man. This is not the same thing as being a happy man, and Virgil is at pains to make this clear.
For more, see our Trojan War guide, the profile of Aphrodite (Aeneas’s mother), the wooden horse truth, and the Helen page.