ABSTRACT
Aineias was the leading member of the junior branch of the Trojan royal family at the time of the great war between Greece and Troy (see p. 453); he had been borne to Anchises, a great-grandson of Tros, by the goddess Aphrodite (see pp. 200-1 for the circumstances of his conception). In his original Greek legend, he was marked out from other male members of the royal family not so much by his personal qualities as by the fact that he was destined to survive; for someone needed to be available to rule the Trojans after the fall of Troy and the destruction of Priam’s senior branch of the family. In one of the battle-scenes in the Iliad, the great god Poseidon, who is normally no friend of the Trojans, rescues Aineias from danger for that very reason, stating that it is ordained that he shall survive so that the race of Dardanos (the founder of the Trojan royal line) shall not perish in its entirety;1 and the same conclusion can be drawn from an episode in the Sack of Troy, a lost epic in the Trojan cycle, in which Aineias and his followers withdraw from Troy before its fall in response to a portent (see p. 475).2 In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, which tells how Aphrodite came to bear Aineias to Anchises (see p. 200), the goddess prophesies correspondingly to Anchises that his son and descendants will reign among the Trojans.3 In the usual tradition from the classical period onwards, Aineias was still in Troy on the night of the sack, as in Vergil’s account in the Aeneid, but escaped through the carnage with his aged father on his back, taking the household gods with him. Authors from Xenophon onwards report that the Greeks allowed him safe passage because they so admired his piety in trying to save his father and household gods.4 This Greek tradition about his conduct on that fateful night provided the basis for the Roman characterization of the just and dutiful Aeneas.
