Aeneas had long been famous for his 'piety', and he was often depicted in the act of carrying his old father on his shoulders out of
burning Troy. Virgil makes him also carry the Trojan penates, resident gods who are to take up their new home in Italy. Pius is his
regular epithet in the poem (Virgil suggests but does not copy the Homeric use of 'formulaic' epithets: above, pp. 66 ff.), meaning
that he above all men identifies his will with the plans of Fate. His sufferings in the poem, in which he is ship-wrecked, forced to
fight a hateful war with the people of Italy, and to abandon the woman he loves, are thus clearly unjust. We hear him complain to
his mother, the goddess Venus, when she has appeared to him in disguise: the episode will illustrate the way in which Virgil uses
and transforms Homeric material. Asked who he is, Aeneas replies bitterly 'Sum pius Aeneas' ('I am the dutiful Aeneas') and goes
on to complain that in obedient pursuit of his destiny he has seen his ships wrecked and himself cast up on an unknown African
shore. His mother sharply rebukes him for his complaints. As she turns away and leaves him she allows him to recognize her, too
late, and he pursues her with reproaches: why will she never stay with him?
The scene, occurring in Book 1, is programmatic. It is based on several Homeric motifs: the scene in Odyssey 9 when Odysseus
identifies himself to the listening Phaeacians ('I am Odysseus, famous everywhere for my clever tricks'); the relationship between
Achilles and his goddess mother Thetis; and several scenes where gods allow their identity to be realized only as they turn away.
But Odysseus' boast is a proud and justifiably confident one, and Thetis is a different sort of mother from Venus-she truly
understands her son, comes when he calls, and never deceives him. Virgil has created from these Homeric hints a scene of great
poignancy, which shows us the whole position of Aeneas. He is struggling to carry out the apparently arbitrary orders of heaven;
and he is lonely. That combination is an explosive one, and we are meant to understand how it follows that the next thing that
happens to Aeneas is that he falls in love.
Aeneas And Anchises: carved gemstone of the Roman imperial period. The motif of the Trojan hero carrying his father on his
shoulder and leading his son Ascanius (lulus) by the hand became a popular subject in art after the publication of Virgil's Aeneid,
in which the dramatic episode of Aeneas' escape from Troy is described in Book 2. The composition seems to have been used for a
famous statue-group in Augustus' Forum.
He has been driven ashore at Carthage, where Dido, a glamorous and heroic widowed queen, is founding her new city. Aeneas'
wife disappeared in the confusion at the fall of Troy. Humanly, the two seem made for each other, even without the interference of
the meddling goddesses. Juno hopes that Aeneas will stay in Carthage and not found Rome; Venus, that Dido will be nice to her
son. Together they push Dido to fall in love with Aeneas. Like Odysseus (Odyssey 9-12) he tells the story of his adventures,
starting with Troy's fall (Aen. 2-3). Odysseus' audience listened with pleasure to the narration of exciting tales; Virgil adds the