The first half of the Aeneid, with its great variety of incident, is likely to be more interesting to modern readers than the second half, with its sometimes monotonously lengthy descriptions of battle and bloodshed. However, Virgil expected that his contemporaries would regard the Trojans's campaign in Italy as more significant than the account of Aeneas's wanderings: It deals with nothing less than the establishment of the Trojans in Latium, site of the future Rome, and the ultimate union of the Trojan and Latin races.
The legendary Trojans, as Jupiter assures Juno at the end of the Aeneid, will be absorbed into the Latin race that existed before their arrival on Italy's soil. Jupiter's announcement to Juno is intended to reconcile her to the Trojans's presence and make her hospitable toward the future Rome; it is also a way of explaining the total absence of any solid evidence — for example, traces of a language — of the Trojans's real, historical existence.
Aeneas and his fellow warriors are, in fact, Romans in disguise. In the imagined world of the epic poem, they represent all of the virtues admired by Romans, of whom, along with the native Latins, they are supposedly the forebears. Furthermore, they are wreathed with the Homeric glory that derives from their having figured in Homer's Iliad, in which Aeneas himself is a hero. Defeated by the Greeks in the Trojan War, the Trojans will be the victors in the war they must now wage in Italy in order to prepare the way for the establishment of Rome, a second Troy.
