Aeneas
Pious exile whose duty repeatedly requires the sacrifice of private love.
Roman · Epic poem · 19 BCE
The Aeneid
Virgil
Aeneas flees burning Troy and, after Carthage and the underworld, fights to plant a future Rome in Italy. Piety wins; the cost is written in every victory.
National epic
I sing of arms and the man, he who, exiled by fate, first came from the coast of Troy to Italy, and to Lavinian shores.
Characters
Dido
Queen of Carthage, the poem’s great argument against destiny’s cruelty.
Turnus
Italian rival whose death stains the founding the poem is asked to celebrate.
Themes
Pietas
Duty to gods, fathers, and future Rome, paid for in the present tense.
Empire’s cost
Augustan glory is scored against abandoned lovers and unburied dead.
Motifs
Troy burns, Dido’s pyre burns, and war keeps the metaphor literal.
Book VI gives Rome a future by walking Aeneas through the dead.
Echoes
Other works that share a motif with this one.