Aeneas was a Trojan hero of Greco-Roman mythology, son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (Roman Venus). A minor but favoured warrior in Homer's Iliad, he receives his fullest treatment in Roman tradition, especially Virgil's Aeneid, where he flees the fall of Troy, wanders the Mediterranean, and becomes an ancestor of Romulus and Remus and thus of the Roman people. Virgil's defining epithets for him are pius (dutiful toward gods and family) and pater.
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I.Birth and the Iliad
The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite tells how Zeus caused Aphrodite to desire Anchises among the herds of Mount Ida; she bore him Aeneas and had nymphs raise the child before returning him to his father. Anchises was later lamed — in some accounts for boasting of the affair — so that at Troy's fall Aeneas must carry him from the flames.
In the Iliad Aeneas leads the Dardanian allies and ranks as a principal lieutenant of Hector. Aphrodite and Apollo rescue him from Diomedes; Poseidon saves him from Achilles, declaring that he is destined to survive and that his line will rule the Trojans. Pseudo-Apollodorus notes that the Greeks spared him alone for his piety.
II.Virgil's Aeneid
Virgil's twelve-book epic makes Aeneas the pious refugee commanded by the gods to found a new home in Italy. He escapes Troy with Anchises, Ascanius (Iulus), and the Trojan household gods; after wanderings that include Sicily (where Anchises dies) and a storm-driven landfall at Carthage, he loves and then leaves queen Dido at Mercury's urging — an abandonment that seeds the later enmity of Carthage and Rome.
In Italy king Latinus welcomes the Trojans and, following a prophecy, offers his daughter Lavinia in marriage. Turnus of the Rutuli wages war; Aeneas prevails. Other Roman sources continue the story: Aeneas founds Lavinium, and after death Venus obtains his immortalization as Jupiter Indiges. Through Ascanius and the kings of Alba Longa he becomes ancestor of Romulus and Remus; the Julian clan traced itself to Iulus and thus to Venus.
III.Character and reception
Greek epic treats Aeneas as an honourable secondary hero reserved by the gods for a future destiny; Roman literature elevates him into the moral founder of the Roman race. His consistent Latin epithet pius marks reverence to the gods and duty to father, son, and people — a deliberate contrast with Odysseus's cunning.
Medieval and later writers reworked the Trojan matter for British and other genealogies (Brutus of Troy) and for romance and opera (Dido and Aeneas). This encyclopedic notice concerns the mythological hero of the Iliad and Aeneid, not modern fictional reuses that merely borrow the name.