Meet the figure of Aeneas, one of the most famous heroes in Greek mythology. We explain his most famous fights and battles.
Aeneas, the hero
The hero Aeneas appears in Greek and Roman mythology. He was a defender of Troy, the city in Asia Minor; which the Greeks destroyed in the Trojan War. After the war, Aeneas led the surviving Trojans to the land now called Italy. According to Roman versions of the myth, Els and his followers founded Rome, and he became its first great hero and legendary father.
Who was Aeneas?
Demigod one who is part human and part god. The setting. Like many legendary heroes, Aeneas was a nobleman and also a demigod. His father was Anchises, a member of the royal family of Troy. One day Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love (called Venus by the Romans), saw Anchises in the hills of Mount Ida near his home. The goddess was so overcome by the beautiful youth that she seduced him and bore him a son, Aeneas.
History of Aeneas
The mountain nymphs raised Aeneas until he was five years old, when he was sent to live with his father. Aphrodite had made Anchises promise not to tell anyone that she was the boy’s mother. However, he did and was struck by lightning. In some versions of the legend, the lightning killed Anchises; in others, it left him blind or lame. Later variations have Anchises surviving and being carried out of Troy by his son after the war.
When the Greeks invaded Troy, Aeneas did not immediately join the conflict. Some versions of the myth say that he entered the war on the side of his fellow Trojans only after the Greek hero Achilles had stolen their cattle. Aeneas’ reluctance to join the fight was due, in part, to the prickly relationship he had with King Priam of Troy.
Some sources say that this hero resented the fact that Priam’s son, Hector, was the supreme commander of the Trojan forces. For his part, Priam disliked Aeneas because the sea god Poseidon had predicted that Aeneas’ descendants, not Priam’s, would rule the Trojans in the future. However, during the Trojan War, he married Creusa, one of Priam’s daughters, and they had a son named Ascanius.
The Greek tradition
Aeneas appears as a character in the Iliad, the epic by the Greek poet Homer that tells the story of the Trojan War. The Iliad and other Greek sources provide a number of details about his role in the war.
According to Greek tradition, Aeneas was one of the leaders of the Trojans, their greatest warrior after Hector. An upright and moral man, he was often called “the pious” because of his respect for the gods and obedience to their commandments. In return, the gods treated this hero well. Not only his mother, Aphrodite, but also the powerful gods Poseidon and Apollo gave him their protection.
There are several accounts of the last days of the Trojan War. One story tells that Aphrodite warned Aeneas that Troy would fall and that he abandoned the city and took refuge on Mount Ida, where he established a new kingdom. In later years, several mountain cities boasted of having been founded by Aeneas.
Escaping
Another version says that Aeneas fought bravely until the end of the war and escaped from Troy with a band of followers or that the victorious Greeks, who respected his honor and piety, allowed him to leave.
In the 700s B . C, the Greeks began to establish colonies in Italy and on the island of Sicily, off the Italian coast. Legends often linked Greek heroes to these colonies, whose citizens liked to think of themselves as descendants of the characters Homer had described in his works.
By the 400s B . C…. if not earlier, the story had taken shape that he went to Italy after fleeing the destruction of Troy. The next stage of the story of Aeneas, however, would be told by the Romans, not the Greeks.
The Roman tradition
By the 300s B . C, Rome was an emerging power in the Mediterranean world. As the city grew larger and more powerful, it faced a dilemma. The Romans shared many myths and legends with the Greeks and had considerable respect for ancient Greek culture. At the same time, however, the Romans did not want to be overshadowed by Greek culture and tradition. They wanted their own connections to the ancient world of gods and heroes.
Roman writers found a perfect link to the legendary past of Aeneas, who was supposed to have arrived in Italy at the time of the founding of Rome. Moreover, because Aeneas was a Trojan, he could give the Romans what they wanted, an ancestry that was connected to the ancient heroes but separate from the Greeks.
Over the centuries, a number of Roman myths developed about Aeneas. According to Roman tradition, this hero fought with great bravery at Troy until messages from Aphrodite and Hector convinced him to abandon the city. Aeneas, carrying his father on his back and holding his son by the hand, led his supporters out of the Trojan bonfire. During the confusion, Aeneas’ wife Creusa became separated from the fleeing Trojans. Aeneas returned to look for Creusa, but did not find her.
Aeneas and his followers found safety on Mount Ida, where they began to build ships. After several months, they set sail for the west. Dreams and omens told Aeneas that he was destined to found a new kingdom in the land of his ancestors, the country now called Italy.
The voyages of Aeneas
After surviving many dangers, including powerful storms and ferocious monsters, Aeneas and his Trojan followers landed on the coast of North Africa. Along the way, his father died. At this point in the Aeneas story, Roman storytellers mixed the hero’s story with earlier tales of a queen named Dido, founder of the North African city of Carthage.
According to Roman legend, Dido and Aeneas fell in love shortly after the hero arrived in Carthage. Aeneas stayed with the queen until Mercury, the messenger of the gods, reminded him that his destiny was in Italy. This hero, sad but obedient, set sail. When he looked back, he saw smoke and flames. Sick with love and abandoned, Dido had thrown herself on a funeral pyre.
Sicily
After stopping in Sicily and leaving some of his followers to found a colony there, Aeneas sailed to Italy. Upon his arrival, he sought advice from Sibyl, a powerful oracle who led him to the underworld. There Aeneas saw the ghost of Dido, but she turned away and would not speak to him. Then he saw the ghost of his father, Anchises, who told him that he would find the greatest empire the world had ever known.
- Omen of future events
- Piles of wood pyre on which a corpse is burned in a funeral ceremony
- Oracle priest or priestess or other creature through whom a god is believed to speak; also the place (such as a shrine) where such words are spoken
- Underworld of the dead
Founder of an empire
Encouraged by his father’s prophecy, Aeneas went to Latium, in central Italy. He became engaged to Lavinia, the daughter of the king of the Latins. Turnus, the leader of another tribe called the Rutuli, launched a war against the newcomers from Troy. Some of the Latins also fought against the Trojans, but he had finally reached his destination and could not be defeated. He first killed Turnus and married Lavinia. Then he founded the city of Lavinium, where Latins and Trojans were united.
After the death of Aeneas, his son Ascanius ruled Lavinium and founded a second city called Alba Longa, which became the capital of the Trojan-Latin people. These cities formed the basis of what became ancient Rome. Some legends say that hero founded the city of Rome. Others assign that honor to his descendant Romulus.
Later Roman historians altered the story of Rome’s origins to make Ascanius the son of him and Lavinia, thus a Latin by birth. Ascanius was also called Iulus, or Julius, and a clan of Romans called the Julians claimed descent from him. Julius Caesar and his nephew Augustus, who became the first Roman emperor, were members of that clan. Thus, the rulers of Rome traced their ancestry, and their right to rule, to the demigod Aeneas.
Aeneas was wounded while fighting against the Rituli, a tribe of Italy. The goddess Venus healed him, and he returned to battle to fight with new vigor and emerge victorious. Here Venus watches as a physician tends to Aeneas’ wound.
Aeneas in literature
Although many ancient authors wrote about this hero, the most complete and influential account of his life and works is the Aeneid, a long poem composed around 30 to 20 B. B.C. by the Roman writer Virgil. Using a style similar to that of the Greek epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Virgil rephrased in Latin the legends and traditions of Aeneas to suit Rome’s vision of its own destiny. In the poem, Virgil tells the story of Aeneas’ journey from Troy to Italy.
Like other figures in Greek and Roman mythology, Aeneas appears frequently in Western literature. In The Divine Comedy, written in the early 1300s AD by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, Aeneas is shown in Limbo, a realm of the afterlife inhabited by virtuous pagans.
Also in British mythology, Brutus, the legendary first king of Britain, is considered the great-grandson of Aeneas. In general, Aeneas represents duty and piety, but some authors have portrayed him less favorably. In his play Cymbeline, for example, William Shakespeare refers to the “false Aeneas” who abandoned Dido. Shakespeare also mentions this hero in his plays Troilus and Cressida and Julius Caesar.
