Who is Aeneas

Aeneas was a character in the leg­ends of ancient Rome. He may have been a real person, though surely the many things that have been written about him are stories, not history, and hardly any part of them can be considered true. Aeneas was the hero of one of the great­est long poems ever written, called the Aeneid, by the Roman poet Virgil, who wrote nearly two thousand years ago. According to the story, Aeneas was a prince of Troy and fought in the Trojan Wars, about which there is a separate article. He was the son of King Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (called Venus by the Romans).

When the Greeks won the Trojan War, Aeneas escaped from the city of Troy and wan­dered for years until he finally arrived on the land that we now call Italy. In his wanderings, Aeneas reached Carthage, an ancient great city on the northern coast of Africa. Carthage was ruled by a queen named Dido, and she fell so in love with Aeneas that when he left to put to sea again, she killed her­self in her grief. Next Aeneas landed in the country of Latium, in Italy. This country was ruled by King Latinus. From the country and thought to be in a group of islands in the Mediterranean Sea, between Italy and Sicily, now called the Aeolian Is- lands. According to the legend, he kept the winds in caves, and let them out to blow around only when he wished to.