Aeneas is best known to the later world through the epic poem of Virgil, in which the hero's travels and trails are explicitly presented as a nationalist myth about the origins and divine destiny of Rome. In Homer's Iliad, Aeneas the Trojan already had a great future ahead of him: the god Poseidon rescued him from the battlefield, prophesying that he and his descendants would be kings. After the fall of Troy, Greek traditions took him, with his father Anchises and son Ascanius and some Trojan companions, to the West, like many other Trojan War veterans from both sides - so providing foundation legends for many places in Sicily and South Italy, where Greeks had been settling from the eight century BC onwards.Aeneas is the second greatest hero of the Trojans in the Iliad. His presence in Roman legend is the result of Greek influence. The Greeks connected settlements in Italy with heroes like Diomedes, Evander, and Odysseus. For example, according to one legend, King Latinus of Latium was the son of Odysseus and Circe. Aeneas became associated with Etruria and Rome. The association with Rome was, according to Ogilvie (1.A Commentary on Livy: Books 1-5, Oxford, 1965), probably due to the Greek recognition of the pietas ('piety', devotion to family, gods and country) traditionally characteristic of Aeneas in fifth-century Romans.Already in the late sixth century BC, the story of Aeneas' flight from Troy was known in Etruria; it is depicted on a number of Athenian black-figure vases found there. The motif also appears on votive statuettes found at the Etruscan town of Veii and on Etruscan gems. He is first associated with Rome by Hellanicus, a Greek historian in the fifth century BC, who wrote that Aeneas founded Rome and called it Rhome (Greek for 'strength') after one of the Trojan women accompanying him. Some Greek writers, however, ascribe the foundation not to Aeneas but to other Trojans and Greeks; in one version, Rome was founded by a son of Odysseus and Circe. Later Aeneas reappears, as father or grandfather of the founder of Rome.
It is not really surprising to find Romans willing to accept that their founders were foreigners. These stories enabled the Romans to claim their own place in the tradition, regarded as in a sense historical', of the Greek heroic past. As descendants of Aeneas the Trojan, in particular, they could still remain separate from the Greeks; better still, Aeneas in Italy appears as a friend and collaborator of Greeks, not their enemy.
There was an alternative tradition, that Rome was founded, not by Aeneas or any Trojan or Greek founder, but by Romulus and Remus. Some early Roman historians said that they were Aeneas' sons, or grandsons. However, it came to be realized that Aeneas, or even his grandchildren, really would not do as founders of Rome. When a Greek scholar, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (275-194 BC), constructing his universal chronology, Chronographia, fixed a date of 1184 BC for the Fall of Troy, the length of the gap between Aeneas and Romulus became obvious. Various dates, ranging from 814 to 728 BC, were proposed fro the foundation of Rome; the one which eventually became accepted was 753 BC. In the early second century BC, the elder Cato filled the gap ingeniously with what became in its main outlines the standard version.
Aeneas, arriving in Latium, at a spot called 'Troia', founded a city called Lavinium on land given him by the local king, Latinus, and ruled there with his wife Lavinia, the daughter of Latinus, over their united people, now called Latins. After Aeneas' death in a war with a local prince, Turnus, and the Rutulians (who, in Virgil, fight Aeneas before his marriage), his son Ascanius founded Alba Longa, which he later handed over to his brother (or, in some versions, son) Silvius, who was the first of a line of kings who conveniently filled the gap until the birth of Romulus and Remus, and, some years later, the foundation of Rome.
...for many of the elements in the story [of Romulus and Remus] that look like traditional mythical components are known to us best through Greek myths, and so could be, in the Roman story, the products of Greek literary invention - the rape of a virgin by a god; the attempt by a king to forestall a threat to his rule, involving danger to the child; the rescue and rearing in humble circumstances; even perhaps, the twins, and the fratricide...Romulus, then, was a 'Latin' founder, from Alba Longa [in Latium]. When and why did he acquire a twin? One founder is enough. Various modern explanations have been offered: the twins are said to have originated in Indo-European creation myth; or the dual consulship in Rome; or two separate communities thought to have existed in early times on the Palatine and the Quirinal; they have even been compared with Cain and Abel. A recent suggestion is that Remus came into the story quite late, and because of Roman politics.
Note
1. Be sure to read Duckworth's History of Rome at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the term. It is very short and it is important that you have a chronological framework for what you learn throughout the term. Return to text.