The Song That Built Rome

The poem begins not at the beginning but in the thick of things: a fleet of ships tossed on the eastern Mediterranean, fleeing the ashes of Troy, bound for a homeland none of them have yet seen. This is how Virgil opens the Aeneid, 9,896 lines of dactylic hexameter composed between 29 and 19 BC, announcing his theme in seven words — arma virumque cano, 'of arms and the man I sing' — before calling on the Muse to explain the causes of it all.

The man is Aeneas, a Trojan hero already familiar to readers of the Iliad, where he is described as Hector's cousin, the son of Anchises and Aphrodite, and a warrior descended from Troy's royal line. In the Iliad he defends the city bravely, second in glory only to Hector himself — a runner-up status that, according to some later legends, curdled into accusations of betrayal, though the more common tradition instead cast him as the leader who guided the surviving Trojans to safety. Either way, Aeneas walks out of the fallen city alive, carrying with him not just his people but the seed of a future nation.

That future nation is Rome, and Virgil's genius was to weld Aeneas' scattered, half-remembered wanderings — known in fragments for centuries before him — into a single, purposeful epic. Long before Virgil, Greek colonists expanding through the sixth century BC had already linked their new Italian and Sicilian homes to Aeneas' story, much as the Odyssey had done for distant lands generations earlier. Greek vases from that century depict Aeneas founding a home in Etruria, and thirteen large altars discovered in Lavinium — the city he was said to have founded, and where he was worshipped — date to the sixth through fourth centuries BC, physical evidence of a myth already taking root.

The Etruscans seem to have adopted Aeneas first, and the Romans absorbed the legend as they conquered Greek colonies and came into closer contact with Greek myth. Scholars point to the war against King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 280 BC as the likely turning point, when Rome found it useful to insert itself into the grand Greek historical tradition through the fall of Troy. Even before Virgil, fragments survive: a passage attributed to the fifth-century BC writer Hellanicus of Lesbos claims Rome was founded by Aeneas with Odysseus' help and named for a Trojan woman called Rhome, while a fourth-century figure named Alcimus made Aeneas the father of Romulus, whose grandson Remus went on to found the city.