He represents Aeneas as having only one ship, built by Mercury,--a limitation which did not suit Virgil's account of the scale on which the war was carried on, after the landing in Italy. The account of the storm in the first Aeneid, of Aeneas consoling his followers, of Venus complaining to Jupiter, and of his comforting her with the promise of the future greatness of Rome (one of the cardinal passages in Virgil's epic), were all taken from the old Saturnian poem of Naevius. He speaks also of Anna and Dido, as daughters of Agenor, though there is no direct evidence that he anticipated Virgil in telling the tale of Dido's unhappy love. He mentioned also the Italian Sibyl and the worship of the Penates--materials which Virgil fused into his great national and religious poem. Ennius followed Naevius in representing Romulus as the grandson of Aeneas. The exigencies of his chronology compelled Virgil to fill a blank space of three hundred years with the shadowy forms of a line of Alban kings. Whatever may have been the origin of the belief in the connexion of Rome with Troy, it certainly prevailed before the poem of Naevius was composed, as at the beginning of the First Punic War the inhabitants of Egesta opened their gates to Rome, in acknowledgment of their common descent from Troy. But the story of the old connexion of Aeneas and Dido, symbolising the former league and the later enmity between Romans and Carthaginians, most probably first assumed shape in the time of the Punic Wars. The belief, as shadowed forth in Naevius, that the triumph of Rome had been decreed from of old by Jupiter, and promised to the mythical ancestress of Aeneas, proves that the Romans were possessed already with the idea of their national destiny. How much of the tale of Aeneas and Dido is due to the imagination of Naevius it is impossible to say; but his treatment of the mythical part of his story,--his introduction of the storm, the complaint of Venus, etc.,--merits the praise of happy and suggestive invention, and of a real adaptation to his main subject.