Postponing until Book II the account of Troy's invasion by the Greeks, which is the chronological starting point of his poem, Virgil begins the Aeneid at what may well be its most crucial and dramatic moment: at the very instant when the Trojans, after many years of wandering, are swept away from their goal of finding a homeland and are stranded on foreign shores that Virgil's readers would have recognized as enemy territory. The elation that the Trojans all felt as they sailed from Sicily is changed to horror and despair, and although by this time Aeneas has been given many prophecies of his eventual success, he must struggle to summon up a brave front for the benefit of his disconsolate companions.
This opening book offers an excellent example of the literary device known as in medias res, a Latin expression meaning "in the middle of things." Common to ancient epics, this narrative technique immediately engages readers's attention by getting the story under way at a crucial point in the action. Virgil's beginning Aeneas's story this way allows the events surrounding the fall of Troy and the adventures that ensue to be narrated afterwards by Aeneas himself. Carthage's Queen Dido, already in love with the Trojan warrior, will find many more good reasons to admire him as he unintentionally presents himself to her as a model of heroism.
Throughout the Aeneid, the actions of human beings are accompanied by the actions of gods and goddesses, who constantly intervene in human affairs as partisans or enemies, and who are remarkably human in their own passions. Juno, for example, possesses a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grudges against the Trojans. Fittingly, her voice is heard first in the poem, and its tone is outrage: She will be the major impediment to Aeneas's unfortunate struggles to found a homeland. Also dramatically significant is that her appearance as the epic's chief divine antagonist should be followed soon afterward by the entrance of Venus, who, as the hero's indulgent and protective mother, opposes Juno with a force that will ultimately prevail.
