Another admirable role Aeneas continues in this book is that of the good father to Ascanius. Worried for the boy’s safety, the Trojan hero’s shepherding his son away from danger emphasizes the human nature of his character. After lifting Anchises onto his back, Aeneas recalls how “little Iulus put his hand in mine / And came with shorter steps beside his father.” Aeneas’s devotion to his son is exemplary.
Aeneas’s treatment of Creusa is less admirable than that which he gives his father and son. To a great extent, Creusa’s character is one-dimensional, and she appears as a mere prop in this superhuman drama. As the family flees Troy, that she walks behind her husband, son, and father-in-law symbolizes her subordinate position in respect to the males. Aeneas incriminates himself as an uncaring husband when he recalls the events leading up to her disappearance: “Never did I look back / Or think to look for her, lost as she was.” His comment, “She alone failed her friends, her child, her husband,” seems to place the blame for her death solely on her, when there can be little doubt—especially when she later appears to Aeneas as a ghost—that she was overcome by Greek soldiers and killed.
However, any blame we place on Aeneas for his treatment of Creusa is tempered by the grief he suffers when he learns of her disappearance. His returning alone to Troy when he knows the great danger of his doing so helps redeem him in our eyes. The grief he feels, which Creusa’s ghost characterizes as madness, is most evident just prior to his encountering her spirit, when he searches frantically from door to door. Finally, Creusa sanctions his actions concerning her when she asks only that he take good care of their son. Like Jupiter in Book I, Creusa’s ghost prophecies Aeneas’s future: She knows the glory that awaits her husband and, even more so, her son, who will become the ancestor of Augustus, to whom Virgil dedicated his epic poem.
Why the Trojans were gullible enough to believe Sinon’s story and drag the horse within Troy’s walls has been heavily debated by critics. The answer, in part, recalls the theme of order versus disorder from Book I. Throughout Book II, although there is a movement toward a more ordered world for Aeneas and his followers, they are anything but safe from their enemy.
The disagreement within the Trojan community about whether or not to drag the horse within the city’s walls is an effect of a disordered world in which the Trojans live. Virgil characterizes the discord within the society as “contrary notions” that “pulled the crowd apart.” Both the gods and the humans are to blame for this mess that the Trojans—“blind miserable people”—find themselves in: “If the gods’s will had not been sinister, / If our own minds had not been crazed, . . . Troy would stand today.” Unfortunately, Virgil can only ask these “What if?” questions, for Aeneas now finds himself in search of a new homeland on which to found a new civilization.
The “shadow / Over the city’s heart” that the wooden horse casts is both physical and psychological. Physically, the Greek soldiers hiding inside the wooden structure will eventually burn Troy to the ground. Psychologically, the Trojans are “deaf and blind” to the evil they willingly usher into their city, and, as Virgil suggests, their vulnerability is partly due to their living complacently and indulgently: The Greeks make their way unchecked into “the darkened city, buried deep / In sleep and wine.” That Aeneas and some fellow Trojan soldiers later disguise themselves in Greek war clothing and are then fired upon by their own men demonstrates just how upside down this world has become.
By the end of Book II, Aeneas has regrouped those of his people who survived the Greek onslaught of Troy. Using a literary device that symbolizes a better future ahead, Virgil writes that a morning star rising over Mount Ida’s ridges appears to Aeneas’s ragged followers. The Trojan warrior recounts to Dido how he determinedly set forth toward Mount Ida to meet that future: “So I resigned myself, picked up my father, / And turned my face toward the mountain range.” His resolute attitude is what we—and, more important, Virgil’s contemporary readers—expect in this story of a world-class hero.
