One tale thus among many respecting AEneas, and that, too, the most
ancient of all, preserved among natives of the Troad, who worshipped him
as their heroic ancestor, was that after the capture of Troy he
continued in the country as king of the remaining Trojans, on friendly
terms with the Greeks. But there were other tales respecting him, alike
numerous and irreconcilable: the hand of destiny marked him as a
wanderer (_fato profugus_) and his ubiquity is not exceeded even by that
of Odysseus. We hear of him at AEnus in Thrace, in Pallene, at AEneia in
the Thermaic Gulf, in Delos, at Orchomenus and Mantineia in Arcadia, in
the islands of Cythera and Zacynthus, in Leucas and Ambracia, at
Buthrotum in Epirus, on the Salentine peninsula and various other places
in the southern region of Italy; at Drepana and Segesta in Sicily, at
Carthage, at Cape Palinurus, Cumae, Misenum, Caieta, and finally in
Latium, where he lays the first humble foundation of the mighty Rome
and her empire. And the reason why his wanderings were not continued
still further was, that the oracles and the pronounced will of the gods
directed him to settle in Latium. In each of these numerous places his
visit was commemorated and certified by local monuments or special
legends, particularly by temples and permanent ceremonies in honor of
his mother Aphrodite, whose worship accompanied him everywhere: there
were also many temples and many different tombs of AEneas himself. The
vast ascendancy acquired by Rome, the ardor with which all the literary
Romans espoused the idea of a Trojan origin, and the fact that the
Julian family recognized AEneas as their gentile primary ancestor,--all
contributed to give to the Roman version of this legend the
preponderance over every other. The various other places in which
monuments of AEneas were found came thus to be represented as places
where he had halted for a time on his way from Troy to Latium. But
though the legendary pretensions of these places were thus eclipsed in
the eyes of those who constituted the literary public, the local belief
was not extinguished; they claimed the hero as their permanent property,
and his tomb was to them a proof that he had lived and died among them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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