Continuing his account of how the Trojans came to present-day Libya’s shores, Aeneas relates how, at the beginning of the summer following Troy’s destruction, the Trojans built a fleet of ships and set forth to seek a new homeland. They landed first in Thrace—now a region in northern Turkey—and were establishing a settlement there when the voice of the dead Polydorus, Priam’s youngest son, spoke from deep within the earth and warned Aeneas to flee the kingdom. Priam, who wanted Polydorus out of harm’s way during the Trojan War, had entrusted him to the protection of Thrace’s king, who had been Troy’s ally. The Thracian king, however, had shifted his allegiance to the Greeks during the war and then treacherously killed Polydorus.
After performing funeral rites for Polydorus, the Trojans left bloodstained Thrace and sailed to the island of Delos, sacred to Apollo, from whom Aeneas sought counsel. Apollo declared through his oracle—his priest, through whose mouth he spoke—that the Trojans should seek their “mother of old,” which Anchises, Aeneas’s father, understood to be Crete, a kingdom ruled by Teucrus, an ancestor of the Trojans.
Following a ritualistic sacrifice to the gods, the Trojans sailed to Crete and attempted to found a city, but their efforts were thwarted by a sudden plague that brought a year of death to humans and crops alike. Anchises then proposed that they return to Delos and again consult the oracle, but this voyage was made unnecessary when Troy’s hearth gods told Aeneas in a vision that Apollo’s oracle had meant that they should go to Hesperia—Italy—the ancestral home of another ancestor, Dardanus.
On the right track at last, the Trojans again set forth toward Italy, but soon they were driven off course by a storm that forced them to take refuge on one of the Strophadës, a group of islands in the Ionian Sea. Here, Harpies, vicious bird-women, assailed them. The Trojans defended themselves as best they could, and Celaeno, the Harpies’s leader, prophesied that after the Trojans reached Italy, famine would drive them to eat their tables as a punishment for their violence against her race.
The Trojans fled from the island and sailed north along the western coast of Greece to Actium, where they spent several months and held athletic contests. From here, they journeyed to Buthrotum, where they were welcomed warmly by the prophet Helenus, a son of Priam, and his wife, Andromachë, the widow of Hector, for whom she still grieved. Helenus warned Aeneas that many trials would still have to be overcome before the voyagers reached Italy, where Aeneas’s discovery of a white sow with a litter of thirty young would indicate the site upon which he was to found his city. Telling Aeneas how best to avoid danger while at sea, including the monster Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, Helenus also advised him to consult the sibyl of Cumae and to appease Juno’s hatred by remembering to offer sacrifices to her.
Andromachë recounted how she and Helenus came to rule together, and provided Aeneas with the information that Pyrrhus, who killed Priam and his son Politës in Book II, was killed by Orestes. Ironically, Pyrrhus’s death occurred “before his father’s altar,” a fitting site for his demise when we remember how cruelly he treated Priam by slaying Politës in front of the Trojan king.
After Aeneas exchanged gifts with his hosts and bid them farewell, the Trojans sailed north to Ceraunia. Here they spent the night and then crossed over to the heel of the Italian peninsula, where Aeneas offered prayers to Pallas and sacrifices to Juno, according to Helenus’s instructions. They then sailed across the Gulf of Taranto and, after escaping Scylla and Charybdis, landed on the coast of Sicily, where they spent a fearful night near Mount Aetna, a volcano.
The next morning, the Trojans were accosted by a Greek, Achaemenidës, a member of Ulysses’s company, who had been left behind accidentally when his companions fled the Cyclops Polyphemus. He begged the Trojans to take him with them or else kill him, which he said would be a better fate than remaining alone, for not only Polyphemus, whom Ulysses blinded, lived in the region, but many other Cyclopes as well. Polyphemus and other Cyclopes then appeared, and the Trojans fled, taking Achaemenidës with them.
They sailed along the coast of Sicily and finally reached Drepanum, where Anchises, Aeneas’s father, died. After burying him, they set sail again and encountered the storm that drove them to Carthage. At this point, Aeneas ends his story.
