Thence come the hardy Latin brood,
The ancient sires of Alba’s blood,
And lofty-rampired Rome.”
Æneas, the son of Venus by the Trojan shepherd Anchi’ses, escaped from burning Troy with his aged father, little son, and household gods. He lay concealed for a time in the mountains; and, when the victorious Greeks had all withdrawn, took ship with the remnant of his people to found a new Troy in the west. After seven years of hardships and mistakes, the Trojans embark from Sicily for “the Hesperian shore.”
Here the Æneid takes up the story. In the first book we see the Trojan fleet driven by a tempest, sent at Juno’s solicitation, on the opposite coast of Africa, near the rising walls of Carthage. Dido, its queen, whom the murder of her husband Sichæus by her unnatural brother had driven from Tyre, receives the strangers hospitably, and by the strategy of Venus conceives a passionate love for Æneas. At her request the Trojan prince tells the pathetic story—the fall of his native city through the wiles of the Greeks, and his subsequent trials.
Æneas returns Dido’s love, but only at last to betray his confiding hostess, and fly with his vessels under cover of the night, in obedience to a warning from Mercury, the messenger of Jove. Too “pious” to disregard the heavenly command, he left Dido to end her sorrow on the funeral pyre.
After a temporary sojourn in Sicily, where he celebrates funeral games to his father’s memory, Æneas at length reaches Cumæ in Italy, and at once seeks the Sibyl. She informs him that his trials are not over, and takes him to the lower world that he may hold an interview with his father Anchises. There he descries among other shades the injured Dido, to whom he endeavors to excuse his conduct.
“’Mid these among the branching treen
Sad Dido moved, the Tyrian queen,
Her death-wound ghastly yet and green.