AENEAS

I am Aeneas, the leader of the Trojans. I am the son of Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite. I am one of the few survivors of the long war that ravaged the city of Troy for ten years. I was one of its staunchest defenders and I fought as an ally of the Trojans, at the head of the Dardanians, a people who lived near the western coast of present-day Turkey.

A long exile awaits me. I am looking for a place in Italy to call home, a homeland that I will not have time to inhabit but that I will leave to my son and his glorious descendants, who will be born from the fusion of East and West, Trojans and Latins.

Homer already talks about me in the Iliad, but it is in Virgil’s work that my story is fully told, transforming the tale of a foreign refugee into the epic of the birth of Rome and its empire.

I am dear to the gods for my pietas, a Latin word that is difficult to translate, which can be interpreted as ‘sense of duty‘, i.e. to commit oneself firmly and solidly to one’s purpose, showing respect and loyalty to all the bonds that bind man to his family, community, religion: justice, loyalty, clemency, valour in battle, endurance in fatigue, the ability to control one’s passions and feelings.

I am a man who has suffered, and continues to suffer a great deal, but who cannot say it and cannot show it because the fate of my son and his lineage depends on me. I am not burdened by the obligation to submit to the destiny that the gods have chosen for me, but I have accepted consciously and with extreme conviction the need to sacrifice my present to make possible a future that I will not see, but of whose greatness I am certain.

On several occasions my character has been misunderstood. I have been accused of being insensitive, almost rude, for my cold and detached attitude towards Dido, the queen of Carthage whom I loved dearly, when I had to leave her lands to continue my journey to Italy and told her that I had never promised her that I would stay or that we would become husband and wife. The truth is that I could not stay because the fates forbade it and because I had the responsibility to shape a new homeland for my son and his descendants.

That is why I became the hero of the ancient Roman people, the paradigmatic model of a culture that foresaw the constant subordination of the individual to the needs of the community. But my being a conquered hero, a defeated exile who had to flee from the destruction of his city, and who was able to resist and rebuild without ever losing hope, has also made me a ‘human hero‘, with whom men and women of every age and every world continue to identify.

© Image from Wikimedia Commons