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.
In fact, the Romans were descended from Indo-European tribes that came southward over the Alps into Italy perhaps as long ago as the middle of the second millennium B.C. Rome, while it had begun to exist in the century assigned by legend, was initially a confederation of shepherd villages. Until 509 B.C., this coalition of villages was ruled by kings, some of whom were Etruscans, members of a tribe who supposedly came from Asia Minor, as the legendary Trojans were supposed to have done. In 509 B.C., however, when the last Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud, was deposed and Rome became a republic, the Etruscans were vanquished, and thereafter their power waned. In the Aeneid, Etruscan warriors, rebelling against their evil king, Mezentius, fight on the side of the Trojans in their war against the Latins.
This instance of a real people who played a real role in the early development of Rome, fighting in a war that can only be regarded as essentially fictitious, offers an example of how legend and history could easily coexist in the Roman mind. Virgil probably assumed that his contemporary readers would regard the primary legends of their national origins, those surrounding Aeneas, as true, and that they would recall Book XX of Homer’s Iliad, in which Aeneas, after boasting of his illustrious lineage to Achilles and then engaging in combat against this greatest of Greek warriors, is rescued from certain death by the sea god Poseidon—the Roman Neptune—because it had been prophesied that Aeneas would be the leader of the Trojan survivors.
Not only Greek literature but Greek religion, as well, was familiar to the Romans, who, during the third and second centuries B.C., merged it with their own, identifying Italian divinities with Greek counterparts to the point of regarding the latter as being the same ones except under different, Greek names. Virgil’s contemporary readers were thoroughly acquainted with the personalities and doings of the gods and goddesses, who generate so much of the action of the Trojan War and provide the vital force of so many other Greek legends and myths.
Therefore, when Virgil, in the opening section of the Aeneid, cites the “judgment Paris gave”—the judicium Paridis, in Latin—as a reason for Juno’s implacable hatred of the Trojans, his readers would have understood immediately this wonderfully succinct allusion, which helped explain why Juno, the queen of the gods, would be a formidable opponent throughout the epic poem. Paris’s judgment, which concerned the awarding of a golden apple—the prize in a kind of divine beauty contest presided over by Paris, a son of Troy’s King Priam and Queen Hecuba—led to the Trojan War and so to the downfall of Troy and, by extension, to Rome’s founding.
