The character of Aeneas as described by Homer and Greek black figure pottery—the warrior cloaked in Trojan armour, an image tied to Ajax that was emblematic of core humanity across both sides of war—is made unrecognisable to us by Virgil’s transformation. In his Aeneid, the semi-divine Trojan prince becomes a Roman hero — but is he really Roman?
Although there are twelve epic books of Aeneas’ character to analyse, the way Virgil distances himself from the depiction in previous epic tradition is most evident in the manner in which the exact same moment is portrayed. In this case, examining the image of Aeneas fleeing Troy with Anchises reveals a profound Romanisation. Virgil includes two dramatic changes to the scene — the carrying of the lares and Aeneas’ son, Ascanius, following closely behind.
Ascanius has a distinctively Roman name, and was not a character present in Homer. In Virgil’s naming of him as Iulus there is a clear connection to his patron and ruler of Rome, Augustus, who sought a national literature to solidify the divine lineage of his Julian family. The future founder of Alba Longa, Ascanius is one of the most frequently mentioned characters of the epic, and Virgil narrates his journey from a young childhood into maturity. In the invention and elaboration of his own, new character, Virgil cements the transformation of a Trojan story into a Roman one, demonstrating a desire to create a sense of unique national identity through the representation of the future generations and leaders of Rome.
Aeneas does not only leave Troy with the members of his family, figuratives of the past and future. With him are the lares, the guardian deitites of his royal household, an even more explicit depiction of his ancestral power and his physical transportation of his ‘nation’ to Italy. This is a culturally confusing image; theoretically these would be the deities of a Trojan spirit and ancestry, but the very idea of the lares is inherently Roman — unlike much of Classical polytheistic religion, this was not shared between the Romans and the Greeks, nor adapted by the Romans. It is probably originally Etruscan, but had evolved to be an essential part of Roman daily worship. Thus, what first appears to be a description of Rome inheriting Trojan culture is blurred into an image of a more definitively Roman prince, even before he has reached Latium.
The Romanisation of Aeneas goes beyond just these two visual transformations of the image; Aeneas here embodies the Roman virtue championed in Aeneas’ epic: pietas. This went beyond its English descendant, piety, as it described a the fulfilment of one’s duty to their family, their homeland, and the gods. In this iconic image, Aeneas achieves all in one — the burden of his father’s weight on his shoulders while he guides his son forward, the saviour of his royal line and, with Virgil’s additions, the ancestral gods in hand as they flee not from battle, but toward the god-given destiny of Rome. In this perfection of what it is to be Roman, Virgil’s thorough cultural transformation of Aeneas becomes clear.
Despite the literary prowess and confidence with which Aeneas becomes a Roman, is nonetheless a strange national image, that belies many of the peculiarities of Roman identity. The Romans, born as they were between other empires, could not conceive of themselves with the requirements of epic — millennia of military conquest, of heroic legend, of grandeur. This struggle to compete with those civilisations before them, the insecurity of being a young empire, creates two things: the desire to be a part of an ancient history, and the drive for a solidly Roman literary tradition.
This is why Aeneas starts off as a Trojan prince, carrying the lares of a Troy in a distortion of history and culture. The Romans deeply admired Greek myth and literature, but this was an admiration mixed with jealousy; in the Trojans, the other side of an epic tradition, cultural equals but military rivals of Greece, the Romans find a perfect ancestor to give their identity the legitimacy and weight of thousands of years.
There are touches to this image which are not only Roman, but particularly Augustan, capturing the fragility of a nation only recently wracked by civil war and forced into Empire. The very impulse to cement an epic Roman identity is one strengthened by the personal desires of the Emperor. The contemporary traces emerge in one other, Virgilian aspect to the image that—utterly unlike the heroic framing of the image before and after—subtly undermines its every theme: the tragic Creusa, Aeneas’ wife, wandering too far behind to make it out, the human sacrifice lingering in the wake of epics, founders, and empires.
Feldman, Louis H. “The Character of Ascanius in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid.’” The Classical Journal, vol. 48, no. 8, 1953, pp. 303–13. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3293617.
Louden, Bruce. “Aeneas in the Illiad: the One Just Man.” Classical Association of the Middle West and South, 2006, https://camws.org/meeting/2006/abstracts/louden.html#:~:text=Apollodorus
The image used is Aeneas Carries Anchises from the Burning City of Troy (Attributed to Giulio Bonasone)(After Raphael) , G9087, Harvard Art Museums collections online, https://hvrd.art/o/182780.