This instance of a real people who played a real role in the early development of Rome, fighting in a war that can only be regarded as essentially fictitious, offers an example of how legend and history could easily coexist in the Roman mind. In the Aeneid, Etruscan warriors, rebelling against their evil king, Mezentius, fight on the side of the Trojans in their war against the Latins. In 509 B.C., however, when the last Etruscan king, Tarquin the Proud, was deposed and Rome became a republic, the Etruscans were vanquished, and thereafter their power waned. Until 509 B.C., this coalition of villages was ruled by kings, some of whom were Etruscans, members of a tribe who supposedly came from Asia Minor, as the legendary Trojans were supposed to have done.
Rome, while it had begun to exist in the century assigned by legend, was initially a confederation of shepherd villages. In fact, the Romans were descended from Indo-European tribes that came southward over the Alps into Italy perhaps as long ago as the middle of the second millennium B.C. To account for the gap in time between the date of the fall of Troy, which a Roman historian fixed at 1184 B.C., and the date of the city's founding, it was imagined that several generations of kings had intervened between these two dates, including Aeneas's son, Ascanius - also known as Iulus - and Numitor, the grandfather of Romulus and Remus. by one of Aeneas's descendants, Romulus, who, with his twin brother, Remus, was a son of Mars, the god of war, and the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia. In the following century, another Greek, Timaeus, told how Aeneas established the city of Lavinium, which is referred to at the very beginning of the Aeneid.Īccording to Roman legend, Rome itself was founded in 753 B.C. 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.
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