Aeneas and the Founding of Rome

At a Glance

Central figures: Aeneas, son of Venus and the mortal Anchises; his father Anchises; his son Ascanius (also called Iulus); Latinus, king of the Laurentines; Turnus, king of the Rutulians; Lavinia, daughter of Latinus.
Setting: From the burning ruins of Troy across the Mediterranean to the coast of Latium, as told in Virgil’s Aeneid and supplemented by Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The turn: Aeneas lands in Latium and seeks an alliance with King Latinus, but Turnus - already betrothed to Lavinia - raises war against the Trojans and their Latin allies.
The outcome: Aeneas kills Turnus in single combat, marries Lavinia, and founds the city of Lavinium; his son Ascanius later founds Alba Longa, establishing the royal line that will produce Romulus.
The legacy: The city of Lavinium and its sacred hearth, the shrine of the Penates brought from Troy, and the Julian family’s claim of descent from Aeneas through his son Iulus.

Troy was burning. Aeneas carried his father on his back, held his son by the hand, and walked out through the Dardanian gate with the household gods bundled against his chest. His wife Creusa followed. Somewhere in the smoke and the screaming she fell behind, and when he turned back to find her, he found only her shade. She told him to go. Italy, she said. A kingdom. A new wife. He did not want to hear it. He went.

That departure - a man leaving a destroyed city with an old father, a small boy, and a bag of wooden gods - is where Rome begins. Not with a sword. Not with a triumph. With refugees on a beach, loading ships.

The Wandering

The fleet carried what remained of Troy’s people westward. They touched Thrace first, where Aeneas planted spears in the earth to build an altar and the spears bled. The ground held the body of Polydorus, a Trojan prince murdered for his gold. They left quickly.

Delos gave them an oracle: seek your ancient mother. Anchises took this to mean Crete, the island their ancestor Teucer had come from, so they sailed there and tried to build. Plague struck. The Penates - the household gods Aeneas had carried from Troy’s innermost shrine - spoke to him in a dream. Not Crete. Italy. The land called Hesperia, where another ancestor, Dardanus, had been born before crossing to Asia. Italy was the ancient mother.

They sailed again. Storms drove them to the Strophades, where the Harpies fouled their food and shrieked prophecy at them. They passed Actium. They wintered in Epirus, where Helenus, a son of Priam who had survived, told Aeneas to seek the Sibyl at Cumae and to watch for a sign: a white sow with thirty piglets, nursing on a riverbank. That would mark the place.

Anchises died in Sicily, at Drepanum, before they ever reached Italy. Aeneas buried him and sailed on.

Carthage and the Queen

Juno hated the Trojans - had hated them since the judgment of Paris, since Jupiter’s love for Ganymede, since every slight real or imagined. She sent storms. The fleet scattered. Aeneas washed ashore near Carthage, where Queen Dido was building a new city with settlers from Tyre.

Venus, Aeneas’s mother, intervened. She sent Cupid disguised as Ascanius to sit in Dido’s lap and breathe desire into her. It worked. Dido and Aeneas became lovers. He stayed through the winter, helping build Carthage’s walls as if they were his own. Jupiter sent Mercury to remind him: Italy. Your fate. Your son’s fate. The city you owe the world.

Aeneas obeyed. He ordered the ships readied in secret. Dido discovered the preparations, raged, pleaded, cursed. He sailed anyway. From the deck he saw the glow of her funeral pyre rising over Carthage. He did not know yet what burned on it.

The Sibyl’s Cave

At Cumae, on the coast of Campania, Aeneas found the Sibyl in her cave - a vast grotto hollowed from the rock beneath Apollo’s temple. She agreed to guide him to the underworld, but first he had to find the golden bough, a branch sacred to Proserpina, growing in a dark forest near Lake Avernus. Two doves, sent by Venus, led him to it. It came free in his hand.

They descended through the cave mouth at Avernus, past the shades of the unburied dead, past Charon’s ferry on the Styx, past the fields where those who died of love wandered. Aeneas saw Dido there. He spoke to her. She turned away without a word.

Deeper, in the fields of Elysium, he found Anchises. His father showed him a river - Lethe, the water of forgetting - and along its banks a procession of souls waiting to be born. These were the future Romans. Anchises pointed them out one by one: Silvius, who would be Aeneas’s son by Lavinia; the kings of Alba Longa; Romulus, who would found the city itself; the Brutus who would drive out the kings; the Scipios, the Fabii, Augustus Caesar. A nation lined up along a riverbank, waiting for bodies.

Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento - remember, Roman, to rule the peoples with your authority. Anchises spoke these words to his son. Spare the conquered. Crush the proud. This was not advice. It was a command, delivered in the underworld, binding as any oath sworn before a pontifex.

Latium and the War

Aeneas reached the mouth of the Tiber. The Trojans ate their meal off flat bread, then ate the bread itself. Ascanius laughed: we have eaten our tables. An old prophecy - the Harpy Celaeno had said they would not found their city until hunger forced them to eat their tables - was fulfilled, and Aeneas knew the journey was over.

King Latinus of the Laurentines received them. Oracles and omens had told Latinus his daughter Lavinia must marry a foreigner. He offered her to Aeneas, along with land.

Juno would not allow it. She sent the fury Allecto to poison the mind of Turnus, king of the Rutulians, who had expected to marry Lavinia himself. War followed - brutal, close, fought across the plains and hills of Latium. Pallas, a young ally of Aeneas, was killed by Turnus, who stripped the boy’s sword belt and wore it. Mezentius, the exiled Etruscan tyrant fighting for Turnus, fell to Aeneas’s spear. Camilla, the warrior maiden of the Volscians, died in the fighting.

The Killing of Turnus

It ended in single combat. Aeneas and Turnus faced each other before both armies. Turnus threw first; his spear struck Aeneas’s shield and glanced away. Aeneas’s spear caught Turnus in the thigh and dropped him.

Turnus, on his knees, asked for mercy. He asked Aeneas to return his body to his father.

Aeneas hesitated. He might have spared him. Then he saw Pallas’s sword belt across Turnus’s shoulder - the belt stripped from a dead boy - and pietas turned to fury. He drove the blade in. Turnus died, and the war was over.

Aeneas married Lavinia. He built Lavinium and placed the Penates of Troy in its central shrine. Three years later he was dead - drowned in the river Numicus, or taken up by the gods, depending on which account you trust. The Latins worshipped him afterward as Jupiter Indiges, a native god, one of their own. His son Ascanius left Lavinium and founded Alba Longa in the hills, and the line continued for three hundred years until a she-wolf nursed two boys on the bank of the Tiber, and the city that Anchises had shown his son along the river of forgetting finally had its name.