Reluctantly accepting Dido’s invitation to tell his story, Aeneas sorrowfully begins with an account of the fall of Troy. He describes how, in the tenth year of the Trojan War, the Greeks constructed an enormous wooden horse, which they then rumored was intended as an offering to the goddess Minerva in order to gain her protection on their voyage home. In truth, they filled the horse with nine of their best warriors, including Ulysses, and then hid themselves in their ships behind the offshore island of Tenedos.
Fooled by this stratagem, Troy’s citizens believed that the Greeks had indeed sailed home. Some wanted to bring the wooden horse into the city; others, rightly suspicious, wanted to destroy it. Laocoön, a priest of Neptune, warned the Trojans that the wooden horse was either full of soldiers or a war machine. Defiantly hurling a spear into the horse’s side, he implored his countrymen to remember the last time the Greeks gave a gift to Troy without deception being involved. Of course, the Trojans could not.
At this point, shepherds came to the crowd gathered around the wooden horse. With them was a Greek captive, Sinon, who said that he had deserted Ulysses’s army after learning that he was to be sacrificed in order to guarantee a favorable homeward wind for the Greeks. In reality, he was lying: He had been left behind by his fellow Greeks to deceive the Trojans and prepare for the Greek invasion of Troy.
Deliberately confusing the Trojans, Sinon explained that the purpose of the horse was to appease Minerva, who was angry with the Greeks because they had stolen her sacred image, the Palladium, from her temple in Troy; the Greeks had sailed home with the Palladium but would return with it in time and again besiege Troy. Minerva would be pacified only when her sacred image was returned from Greece to Troy with due ceremonial reverence. Sinon then said that if the wooden horse were harmed in any way, the goddess would destroy Troy for its impiety, but if it were brought within the city’s walls, Troy would conquer Greece.
The Trojans began to believe Sinon’s explanation and were finally convinced of his story’s truthfulness after two serpents rose out of the sea and crushed Laocoön and his two sons in their coils, an event that the onlookers regarded as rightful punishment for Laocoön’s having attacked the horse. Hoping to make reparation for Laocoön’s lack of reverence for Minerva and win the goddess’s favor, the Trojans followed Sinon’s advice and brought the horse into the city. The real intention of Minerva, who, according to tradition, helped build the wooden horse, was to destroy Troy. She killed Laocoön and his sons because she wanted the Trojans to believe that Sinon’s story was true and bring the wooden horse within Troy’s walls.
That night, while the weary Trojans slept, Sinon released the Greek warriors hidden inside the horse and opened Troy’s gates to the remaining Greek forces, which had sailed back to Troy’s shores from Tenedos. The Trojans were helpless against the assault, and Troy was soon in flames. Hector, King Priam’s son, who had been slain by Achilles earlier in the Trojan War, appeared to Aeneas in a dream and told him that all was lost, and that he should take Troy’s gods of hearth and household—the Penatës—and seek a new city for them.
Waking, Aeneas, disillusioned by the disastrous events revealed in his dream, armed himself and went out into the city, desperately planning to die in combat. He was joined by other Trojans, and after many struggles, including disguising himself as a Greek soldier to more easily traverse the city’s streets, he arrived at Priam’s besieged palace, where he witnessed the havoc wrought by Pyrrhus, Achilles’s ferocious son. Pyrrhus rashly murdered Priam’s son, Politës, in front of the king, and then he killed Priam himself at the altar of Jupiter.
Aeneas, suddenly concerned about the fate of his father, Anchises, his wife, Creusa, and his son, Ascanius, all of whom were still at home, began to make his way to them through Troy’s streets when he unexpectedly encountered Helen. Convinced that her elopement with Paris was the cause of the war and Troy’s downfall, he was seized by a vengeful desire to kill her and would have done so if his mother, Venus, had not appeared and stayed his hand. Venus told him that neither Helen nor Paris was to blame for Troy’s destruction; it was willed by the gods, whom she caused to appear to Aeneas in a series of visions that showed them all in a destructive mood.
Aeneas, deciding to flee from Troy with his family, returned home at last, but Anchises, who declared that he would rather die than face exile at his age, refused to abandon his home and urged the others to leave without him, which they would not do despite certain death if they stayed. At that moment, Aeneas and his family witnessed a portent: A flame appeared around Ascanius’s head, and when Anchises prayed to Jupiter for another sign, thunder rumbled—an affirmative omen—and a star streaked across the sky in the direction of Mount Ida. Now convinced that his departure was divinely ordained, Anchises changed his mind; with Aeneas holding his son by the hand and carrying his father on his back, and Creusa following behind, they left the house.
Turning to look for Creusa after the group reached a safe place outside the city that had been designated earlier as the rendezvous point for people wishing to flee Troy, Aeneas discovered that his wife had mysteriously vanished. He went back alone into the chaotic city to try to find her, but, instead, he encountered her ghost, which told him that he was destined to marry again after reaching his new homeland. Returning to Anchises and Ascanius, Aeneas found with them a large number of refugees waiting for him to lead them. As morning came, the band of survivors headed in the direction of Mount Ida.
