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.
