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.
