A Dardanian prince loved by Aphrodite amid the spurs of Ida, where the goddess lay with a mortal man and conceived his son Aeneas while he tended his cattle.1
In Homer, Aeneas leads the Dardanians as the valiant son of Anchises, whom fair Aphrodite conceived to him amid the spurs of Ida, a goddess couched with a mortal man — elsewhere the poet adds that she came to Anchises as he tended his cattle. Facing Achilles, Aeneas recites the lineage himself: Assaracus begat Capys, Capys begat Anchises, and Anchises begat him. Hesiod closes the Theogony with the same union: fair-crowned Cytherea was joined in sweet love with the hero Anchises and bore Aeneas on the peaks of wooded Ida.2
Apollodorus fixes his place in the Dardanid genealogy: Capys and Themiste, daughter of Ilus, were his parents, and Aphrodite, meeting him in love's dalliance, bore him Aeneas and a second son, Lyrus, who died childless. When the city fell, Aeneas took up his father Anchises and fled, and the Greeks let him alone on account of his piety.3
Ovid's Venus does not forget her mortal lover: when the aging of divine favorites stirs complaint among the gods, she is touched by care for the future and pleads for Anchises' years to be renewed. In the Trojan books the Cytherean hero shoulders his father out of falling Troy, a venerable burden, and at Delos the old man trades courtesies with the priest-king Anius, departing with a scepter as guest-gift; later Aeneas finds only the aged shade of great-souled Anchises among the wealth of Orcus.4
The later sources part over his end. In Hyginus — who counts Anchises, whom Venus loved, among the handsomest of men, and there calls him a son of Assaracus rather than Capys — Aeneas, son of Venus and Anchises, commemorates his father's death with funeral games in Sicily at the home of his host Acestes. But Pausanias saw the tomb of Anchises in Arcadia, at the foot of Mount Anchisia near Mantineia, with the ruins of a sanctuary of Aphrodite beside it, and notes that the Aeolians who occupy Troy point out no tomb of Anchises in their own land.5
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