Aeneas's role as a dutiful father is expanded in Book III to include paternal responsibility not only for Ascanius and the Trojans in his immediate care, but for the entire Roman race to come. When Helenus tells Aeneas to "let your progeny / Hold to religious purity thereby," the progeny that the Buthrotum ruler is referring to is that of the Julian line, including Augustus. Helenus's comment is similar to one made earlier by Andromachë, who, concerned for Ascanius's well-being, asks Aeneas if he is fostering "old-time valor and manliness" in his son. These virtues of valor and manliness are prized by Virgil as qualities befitting Aeneas and his Trojan people, and the poet's own fellow Roman citizens.
The Trojans's harboring Achaemenidës, the Greek who is abandoned on the Cyclopes's territory by his Greek shipmates, recalls how the Trojans allowed the trickster Sinon to enter within Troy's walls in Book II. We wonder just how gullible Aeneas and his people can be to accept so willingly another Greek warrior into their company. Nevertheless, they do. Perhaps Virgil is emphasizing the deep humaneness of the Trojans and, by extension, the poet's own race.
Aeneas's concluding his explanation of how the Trojans came to be in Carthage with the announcement that Anchises, his father, died in Drepanum greatly explains his sorrowful reluctance to recount the Trojans's past when Dido initially asked him to. His dejection over losing his beloved father might also explain why in Book IV he will allow Dido to waylay him from his fate-appointed mission to found a new homeland. Stylistically, note how Virgil parallels the turbulent weather that the Trojans sailed through to reach Drepanum, where Anchises died, to Aeneas's grieving emotions over his father's death: "And in the end the port of Drepanum / Took me in, a landing without joy. / For after storms at sea buffeted me / So often, here, alas, I lost my father, / Solace in affliction and mischance." "O best of fathers," the devoted Aeneas says, and then falls silent, his tale of the Trojans's past having come to an end.
