by one of Aeneas's descendants, Romulus, who, with his twin brother, Remus, was a son of Mars, the god of war, and the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia. In the following century, another Greek, Timaeus, told how Aeneas established the city of Lavinium, which is referred to at the very beginning of the Aeneid.Īccording to Roman legend, Rome itself was founded in 753 B.C. This legend of Aeneas's voyage, which the Romans elaborated for their own patriotic purposes, was recorded as far back as the fifth century B.C. Long before Virgil's time, Romans liked to believe that among their ancestors were the legendary Trojans, who, under Aeneas's leadership, sailed from Troy, in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), westward across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and settled in Latium, site of the future Rome.
Because the events that take place in the poem were recounted from generation to generation, they eventually took on the appearance of unquestionable truth. We must bear in mind, however, that the epic was seen in an entirely different light by Virgil's contemporaries. It is primarily a fiction whose narrative fabric, woven from myth and legend, traces a pattern that appears in the most profound myths that concern the human spirit's eternal quest for self-perpetuation. The Aeneid, the story of a band of survivors who leave their destroyed city to seek another home in a faraway country, is about rebirth, about life springing forth from ruin and death.
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