![]() This legend of Aeneas's voyage, which the Romans elaborated for their own patriotic purposes, was recorded as far back as the fifth century B.C. ![]() Long before Virgil's time, Romans liked to believe that among their ancestors were the legendary Trojans, who, under Aeneas's leadership, sailed from Troy, in Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), westward across the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and settled in Latium, site of the future Rome. ![]() Because the events that take place in the poem were recounted from generation to generation, they eventually took on the appearance of unquestionable truth. ![]() We must bear in mind, however, that the epic was seen in an entirely different light by Virgil's contemporaries. It is primarily a fiction whose narrative fabric, woven from myth and legend, traces a pattern that appears in the most profound myths that concern the human spirit's eternal quest for self-perpetuation. The Aeneid, the story of a band of survivors who leave their destroyed city to seek another home in a faraway country, is about rebirth, about life springing forth from ruin and death. ![]()
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