Oxford Dictionary of World Mythology

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Aeneas

Aeneas Europe
The famous Trojan-Roman hero; the son of Anchises and the goddess Venus-Aphrodite. The Romans believed that an important element among them came from Asia Minor—Trojans who escaped the sack of Troy by the Greeks and followed Aeneas. This myth received classic statement in Virgil's Aeneid, an account of the wanderings of fugitive Aeneas till his settlement in Italy. Imperial interest in the epic poem was pronounced. From Spain in 26 BC Augustus, the first Roman Emperor, wrote to Virgil expressing a wish to have a draft or portions of the Aeneid which had been begun about that time. Virgil celebrated the destiny of the Romans as the divinely inspired rulers of the ancient world: it was a sentiment close to the heart of the victor of Actium.

After sailing to Crete, where he learned in a dream that Dardanus, ancestor of the Trojan royal family, hailed originally from Italy, Aeneas continued to Epirus upon the eastern Adriatic...

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