When the Greeks entered Troy to devastate it the ghost of Hector told Aeneas to leave. Aided by his mother Venus, Aeneas fought the Greeks and made his way out of the doomed city with his father Anchises and his son Iulus. He joined a group of Trojan comrades and together they built some ships with which they sailed to Thrace, where Aeneas hoped to set up a colony. Warned off by a Trojan ghost who had been murdered by the Thracians, they made for Delos, where an oracle of Apollo told the Trojans to return to the land of their ancestors. Thinking that Apollo meant Crete, they moved to this island, which was uninhabited, only to be dogged by pestilence. At length Aeneas dreamed that his future home lay far to the west in Italy, from which the Trojan Dardanus had come long before. Aeneas now knew where his destiny was taking him.
Having left Crete, the Trojans were caught in a storm that drove them up the western coast of Greece. Driven off by those birdlike monsters, the Harpies, they sailed to Epirus and found Prince Helenus of Troy married to Hector's wife, Andromache. When Troy fell Andromache had been taken captive by Achilles' son Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus in Greek), and when he was killed she married Helenus. The pair entertained Aeneas and his comrades. Helenus foretold that they would have a perilous time getting to Italy, and he warned them against the Strait of Messina, where Scylla and Charybdis waited. Further, they were to sail to Cumae sometime in the future, where Aeneas would consult the Sibyl, a prophetess.
