Rome chose a defeated Trojan, not a Greek victor, as its founding hero
Aeneas was a minor figure in Homer's Iliad, a Trojan the gods kept rescuing as if saving him for something. Rome supplied the something. In Virgil's Aeneid he escapes burning Troy carrying his lame father, wanders for years, and becomes the ancestor of Romulus and Remus. Virgil's favourite word for him is pius, dutiful.
His mother was the goddess Aphrodite, his father the Trojan prince Anchises, a cousin of King Priam. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells how Zeus, annoyed that she kept making gods fall for mortals, turned the trick on her, and she seduced Anchises on Mount Ida disguised as a Phrygian princess. The hymn has her name the boy from a Greek word for terrible, after the grief of bearing a son who would die, though the true origin of the name is uncertain. Some sources say Anchises later bragged about the affair and Zeus lamed him with a thunderbolt.
In the Iliad, Aphrodite and Apollo pull Aeneas from a fight with Diomedes, and even Poseidon, usually on the Greek side, saves him from Achilles because he is destined to rule the Trojans. Some ancient writers claimed the Greeks spared him alone for his piety, and scholar Bruce Louden places him beside Noah and Lot as the lone virtuous survivor of a general catastrophe.
Roman writers from Cato the Elder to Livy built out the story before Virgil gave it full form. Where Homer's Odysseus is wily, Aeneas is pious and a father to his people. His father dies at Drepanum in Sicily; a storm stirred by Juno drives the fleet to Carthage, where he has a year-long affair with Queen Dido before the gods order him onward. In Latium King Latinus offers his daughter Lavinia, which provokes war with her former suitor Turnus. Virgil's poem ends abruptly with Turnus dead.
Other sources finish the tale. Livy has Aeneas found Lavinium, named after his wife, and after his death Venus persuades Jupiter to make him a god, worshipped as Jupiter Indiges. Medieval Britain claimed descent from his son Brutus of Troy, a belief that faded by the Renaissance, and Snorri Sturluson even equated him with the Norse god Vidarr.
Source: Aeneas
