Aeneas is a warrior and a goddess's son, who will lead his people to safety and prepare for the establishment of a new Troy in Italy; but, first of all, he is a human being, at times prone to fear and indecision. Like everybody else in Troy that fateful night the city fell, he went to bed without suspicion, duped like the rest by Sinon and unaware that the city shortly would be in flames. Notably, however, Aeneas is never directly involved in the scenes in which Sinon convinces the Trojans to move the horse within their city's walls. Instead, King Priam himself questions the trickster.
Priam's presence at Sinon's inquisition and his actions later in the book show him to be an ineffectual leader of his people. A symbol of all that has gone wrong in Trojan society, he is duped by the lying Sinon, which suggests that he has succumbed to complacency in his rule. Worse, Virgil describes Priam as an "old man" who "uselessly / Put on his shoulders, shaking with old age, / Armor unused for years." Remembering that the Trojan War has been raging for ten years, Virgil's description of Priam's military prowess strongly suggests that the king's physical skills have waned during this time span.
Additionally, our last view of King Priam is not a very flattering one. Hecuba, his wife, questions — perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not — his mental acumen when she asks him what "mad thought" drove him to think he could fight the Greeks. She acknowledges what Priam cannot, that Troy's destruction and his approaching death symbolize the passing of a generation and a way of life. Unfortunately, the new, reigning generation will include individuals like Pyrrhus, who irreverently kills Priam's son in front of the king and then brazenly mocks Priam. When Priam recalls how Pyrrhus's father once nobly showed mercy to the Trojan king, Pyrrhus's response to the memory of his own father is cold, calculated, and inhumanely cruel: "You'll report the news / To Pelidës, my father; don't forget / My sad behavior, the degeneracy / Of Neoptolemus. Now die." In Book III, we learn that even the barbaric Pyrrhus is not invincible; he too becomes a victim of revenge when he is slaughtered by Orestes.
