The Aeneid, the story of a band of survivors who leave their destroyed city to seek another home in a faraway country, is about rebirth, about life springing forth from ruin and death. It is primarily a fiction whose narrative fabric, woven from myth and legend, traces a pattern that appears in the most profound myths that concern the human spirit's eternal quest for self-perpetuation. We must bear in mind, however, that the epic was seen in an entirely different light by Virgil's contemporaries. Because the events that take place in the poem were recounted from generation to generation, they eventually took on the appearance of unquestionable truth.
Long before Virgil's time, Romans liked to believe that among their ancestors were the legendary Trojans, who, under Aeneas's leadership, sailed from Troy, in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), westward across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and settled in Latium, site of the future Rome. This legend of Aeneas's voyage, which the Romans elaborated for their own patriotic purposes, was recorded as far back as the fifth century B.C. by a Greek, Hellenicus of Lesbos. In the following century, another Greek, Timaeus, told how Aeneas established the city of Lavinium, which is referred to at the very beginning of the Aeneid.
According to Roman legend, Rome itself was founded in 753 B.C. by one of Aeneas's descendants, Romulus, who, with his twin brother, Remus, was a son of Mars, the god of war, and the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia. To account for the gap in time between the date of the fall of Troy, which a Roman historian fixed at 1184 B.C., and the date of the city's founding, it was imagined that several generations of kings had intervened between these two dates, including Aeneas's son, Ascanius — also known as Iulus — and Numitor, the grandfather of Romulus and Remus.
