Aeneas is still telling Queen Dido of the fall of Troy. After the death of King Priam, Aeneas’s night again swings wildly. Desperate bloodshed alternates with supernatural and human encouragement to escape, preserve the gods and heritage of Troy and lay the basis for Rome and its imperial family. His mother, Venus, has just told him that it is really the Gods, who cannot be resisted, who are destroying the city, and not the Greeks. Aeneas has tried but failed to persuade his father Anchises to join him in escape. (Anchises has an unusual disability: Jupiter once scorched him with his thunderbolt for boasting about his affair with Venus.) In this extract, signs from Jupiter himself persuade Anchises to relent and allow Aeneas to carry him to safety. As well as being the grandson of Jupiter, the little boy, Iulus, is the ancestor of Julius Caesar and the Emperor Augustus.
See the illustrated blog post here.
To follow the story of Aeneas in sequence, use this link to the full Pantheon Poets selection of extracts from the Aeneid. See the next episode here.