SPECIAL AENEAS: PRINCE, REFUGEE, FOUNDER OF ROME
A relief from the Ara Pacis depicting either Aeneas or Numa performing a sacrifice. Under Augustus, the myth of Aeneas took its definitive form in the Aeneid.
© Carole Raddato / Flickr
A black-figure amphora, dated to ca. 500 BC, depicting Aeneas carrying his father, Anchises, on his shoulders. Aeneas' flight from Troy was a common theme in Greek art.
© The Metropolitan Museum of ArtAeneas appears first in the epic cycle of the Trojan War. The most famous part of this epic cycle is Homer’s in which we encounter Aeneas first at the muster of forces loyal to King Priam of Troy near the city’s walls, leading the men of Dardania, the mountain realm south of the city: “brave Aeneas, the offspring of Aphrodite’s amorous encounter with Anchises on the slopes of Ida” ( 2. 819-20). In his battlefield encounter with fearsome Achilles, he is saved from death by the seagod Poseidon, who declares that “It is destined that he shall be the survivor, that the generation of Dardanos shall not die … since Dardanos was dearest to Kronides [Zeus] of all his sons that have been born to him from mortal women” ( 20.302–5). And survive he did, as the fragments of the epic cycle tell 20.307–8) is taken by many scholars as evidence that a dynasty of kings survived in the southern Troad who claimed to be Aeneas’ descendants.