Troy is announced by the mouth of Poseidon in the twentieth Book of the Iliad (307-308): Νῦν δὲ δὴ Αἰνείαο βίη Τρώεσσιν ἀνάξει καὶ παίδων παῖδες, τοί κεν μετόπισθε γένωνται. If an historical character may be assigned to any passages in the Iliad, it may be presumed that the author of these verses knew of a line of princes ruling over some remnant of the Trojans, and claiming Aeneas as their ancestor. But these verses do not imply any removal to a distant settlement. The Cyclic poet, Arctinus, next spoke of Aeneas as retiring to Mount Ida and founding a city there. The earliest traditions accordingly point to the Troad as the scene of the rule of his descendants other traditions however, which must have been known to Virgil, brought him to Thrace, to various places on the Aegean, and to Buthrotum in Epirus. The origin of these traditions is believed to be the connexion of Aeneas with the worship of Aphrodite, which was widely spread over the Mediterranean, probably as a survival of early Phoenician settlements. This connexion in worship is supposed to have arisen from a confusion between the Trojan hero and the title Aveas, denoting one of the attributes of the goddess. But the writer who first gave the idea of a Trojan settlement in Italy is said to have been Stesichorus, the lyrical poet of Himera in Sicily, who flourished about the beginning of the sixth century B. C. One of the representations in the Ilian table in the Capitoline Museum exhibits the figures of Aeneas, of his son Ascanius, of the trumpeter Misenus, and of Anchises carrying the sacred images, just as they are on the point of embarking on board their ship. The following inscription is written under these figures, Αἰνήας σὺν τοῖς ἰδίοις ἀπαίρων εἰς τὴν Ἑσπερίαν 3, and the 'IMíov Tépois of Stesichorus is quoted as the authority for the representation 3. The motive actuating Stesichorus was And now the mighty Aeneas shall rule over the Trojans, and his children's children who may be born hereafter.' 2 Aeneas with those belonging to him starting for Hesperia.' 3 Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 298. probably the desire to connect the newly-discovered localities in Italy and Sicily with the cycle of Homeric narrative. But Stesichorus apparently knew nothing of a Trojan settlement in Latium; Siris in Oenotria seems to have been fixed on by him as the place of refuge for the Palladium and the Penates of Troy. It was after the destruction of Siris that the fancy of the Greeks fixed on Lavinium, where there was a worship similar to that established at Siris, as the ultimate resting-place of Aeneas. The first definite statement connecting Rome with Troy was made by Cephalon of Gergis in the Troad (about 350 B. C.), who ascribed the foundation of the city to Romus a son of Aeneas. In the course of the next half century this appears to have become the prevailing belief among the Greeks, whose attention was now attracted by the growing ascendency of Rome in Italy. About the beginning of the third century Timaeus, the Sicilian historian, is said to have shaped the legend into the form adopted by Naevius 1. It is obvious that there is a great gap in our knowledge of the stages in the development of the legend between Stesichorus, a poet of the sixth century, and Cephalon, an historian of the fourth. And the question suggests itself whether, in the interval between them, the Romans themselves had accepted any similar explanation of their origin. The early connexion between Rome and Cumae renders it not impossible that the Romans had formed some idea of their Trojan descent, before the wars of Pyrrhus brought them into more intimate connexion with the Greeks. It was by the Greek colonists of Cumae that the Isles of the Sirens, the Kingdom of the Laestrygones, and the abode of Circe were localised near Sorrento, the ancient town of Formiae, and the promontory of Circeii. It seems probable that to them also may be ascribed the mythical connexion established between the promontories of Caieta, Misenum, and Palinurum, in their own immediate neighbourhood, with the names of the household or followers of Aeneas. The 1 The account here given of the development of the legend is taken from Schwegler, Römische Geschichte. mythical traditions which assign a Greek origin to various important Latin towns, such as Tibur, Tusculum, Praeneste, and to the earliest settlement on the Palatine Hill, probably owe their invention to the same source. Alba Longa, as the chief city of the old Latin confederacy, must have been an object of greater interest to the Cumaeans than Tibur or Tusculum, and if we could be sure of the existence of the belief in the Trojan settlement in Latium before the destruction of Alba, we might infer with probability the great antiquity of the legend which ascribed the foundation of that town to the son of Aeneas. This belief might easily have passed to Rome; and Cephalon may have received it, in a somewhat distorted form, from native sources. But it is impossible to take any step in these conjectures without feeling the extreme uncertainty of our ground. We really know nothing of the acceptance of this account of their origin by the Romans before the time of the First Punic War; it is not easily reconcileable with the indigenous belief which certainly struck much deeper roots in the national history: the story as told by Cephalon appears to exclude the connexion between Rome and Alba as an intermediate link in that between Rome and Troy. It seems, on the whole, most probable that the story on which the Aeneid is founded is not only a Greek invention, but is an invention of a late and prosaic time, and was not known to the Romans before the date of their wars with Pyrrhus1. But besides the foreign and prosaic origin of the story, there is great vagueness and indistinctness in the incidents and personages connected with it. Homer indeed has supplied a definite, though not a marked, outline to the character of Aeneas; and Stesichorus, in shaping the family group of Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius flying from Troy with their household-gods, may have suggested to Virgil the leading characteristic of his hero. But these were nearly all the elements in the legend derived from primitive poetical sources. The growth of this legend is discussed with learning and ability by Professor Nettleship in his Vergil,' pp. 46-61. There was no individuality of character attaching to any of the followers of Aeneas, nor any incident due to early imaginative invention associated with the dim tradition of his wanderings. The story, as finally cast into shape by Virgil, is one of composite growth, made up of many heterogeneous elements,some supplied by poetical invention and the impressions of a primitive time, some the products of prosaic rationalism and the antiquarian fancies of a literary age, some suggested by Greek mythology and others by the ritual observances of Rome, some directly borrowed from the Homeric poems, others derived from the traditions of ancient Italy. It need hardly surprise us if out of such indistinct and heterogeneous materials Virgil failed to shape a thoroughly consistent and lifelike representation of human action and character. But, on other grounds, the judgment of Virgil may be justified in the choice of this legend, vague, composite, and unpoetical as it was, as most adapted to his own genius and to the purpose of his epic poem. It was the only subject, of national significance, connected with the Homeric cycle of events. Not only the epic and dramatic poets of Greece, but the Roman tragic poets had recognised the heroic legends of Greece as the legitimate material for those forms of poetry which aimed at representing human action and character with seriousness and dignity. The personages and events connected with the Trojan War had especially been made familiar to the Romans by the works of their early dramatic poets. The Romans themselves had no mythical back-ground, rich in poetic associations, to their own history. It was impossible for a poet of a literary age to create this back-ground. But it was possible for him to give substance and reality to the shadowy connexion, existing in legend and in the works of older national writers, between the beginnings of Roman history and this distant region of poetry and romance. Virgil's imagination, as was seen in the examination of the Georgics, was peculiarly susceptible of the impressions produced by a remote antiquity and by old poetic associations. If he was deficient in spon taneous invention, he possessed a remarkable power of giving new life to the creations of earlier times. Next to the invention of a new world of wonder and adventure,―a work most difficult of accomplishment in a late stage of human development,―the most attractive aim which an epic poet could set before himself was that of reviving, under new conditions and with an immediate reference to the feelings of his contemporaries, an image of the old Homeric life. The subject of the wanderings and subsequent adventures of Aeneas enabled Virgil to tell again, and from a new point of view, the old story of the fall of Troy, to present a modern version of the sea-adventures of the Odyssey, and to awaken the interest of a nation of soldiers in the martial passions of an earlier and ruder age. Although there is no evidence that the connexion of Rome with Troy had sunk deeply into the popular mind before the time of Virgil, yet it had been recognised in official acts of the State for more than two centuries. So early as the First Punic War the Acarnanians had applied to the Romans for assistance against the Aetolians, on the ground that their ancestors alone among the Greeks had taken no part in the Trojan War. The Senate had offered alliance and friendship to King Seleucus on condition of his exempting the people of Ilium, as kinsmen of the Romans, from tribute1. T. Flamininus, in declaring all the Greeks free after the conclusion of the Second Macedonian War, described himself as one of the Aeneadae 2. In the Second Punic War, the prophet Marcius uses the word Troiugena as an epithet of the Romans: 1 Suetonius says of the Emperor Claudius, 'Iliensibus, quasi Romanae gentis auctoribus, tributa in perpetuum remisit, recitata vetere epistula Graeca Senatus populique Romani Seleuco regi amicitiam et societatem ita demum pollicentis, si consanguineos suos Ilienses ab omni onere immunes praestitisset.' For these and other official recognitions of the connexion between Rome and Ilium, see Schwegler, Römische Geschichte, vol. i. p. 305 et seq. 2 Mommsen (book iii. ch. 14) quotes these two lines from an Epigram composed in the name of Flamininus: Αἰνεάδας Τίτος ἔμμιν ὑπέρτατον ὤπασε δῶρον |