What was Aeneas' Homeric fate exactly?
The gods put a lot of effort into protecting him during the Trojan war, apparently because he's destined to become king of the Trojan people.
Was he supposed to escape and found his own kingdom like in the Roman conceptualization of him, or was he simply destined to become king because if the sack of Troy never occurred, someone would have to succeed Priam anyway? The idea that he's destined to go to Italy works quite well in retrospect, but Homer can't have been thinking about that when singing about Aeneas' skirmishes, so it's something I find confusing. He's the son of Aphrodite so I imagine the Greeks had some ideas about him, are they all lost?
Follow up question: was the Roman idea of Aeneas a direct attempt to claim heritage from a famous bloodline, or was there an actual natural development between a Homeric refugee that people knew about from Greek mythology and that refugee coming to Italy?
The answer to all this might just be "we don't know the Greek Aeneas besides what Homer said", but I'm quite curious.
Posted Dec 13, 2019, 2:24 PM UTC
The Roman story is based on long-standing Roman myths about the links back and forth between Etruria and Troy. There is no firm archaeological evidence to support this, and despite attempts, no linguistic links have been proven either. We don’t know how the myth started.
In Homer, Aeneas doesn’t do much at all. The gods rescue him from time to time. It’s because he’s a shadowy figure, that the Romans could dump their wishful thinking on him. The idea that the line of Aeneas would one day rule Troy is Homeric, but the story of his wandering and settlement in Italy is purely Roman.
I see, so we can't really uncover much more than what we're told by Homer and Latin authors who push their Roman pride onto him. It's quite interesting that the Etruria-Troy myth goes that far back. Thanks for the comment.
Etruria wasn't the only Italic civilization with a Homeric myth at its founding. Livy takes pride in being from Padua, which he notes in Ab urbe condita is said to be founded by Antenor.