The Aeneid

Aeneas

Seven years at sea have cost Aeneas his wife, his city, and most of his fleet; what remains is a mission to found a new Troy in Italy, pressed on him by fate and by his mother Venus. He is pious before he is happy — he obeys oracles, carries his father on his shoulders, and buries his grief in duty — yet the poem keeps asking what that piety costs him personally. When a storm scatters his ships onto Dido's coast, his arrival sets in motion the love affair that will define the epic's first half and test whether a man can be both a lover and a founder.

Turnus

Turnus is the finest warrior of Latium, betrothed to King Latinus's daughter and confident of his place at the head of Italy — until Aeneas's ships appear and the gods begin rewriting his future. His rage at being displaced is the engine of the war that consumes the epic's second half, and he fights with the fury of a man who believes he is defending what is rightfully his. Virgil gives him courage, nobility, and a sister who will do anything for him, which makes him far harder to dismiss than a simple villain.

Juno

Juno has reasons stacked on reasons: Paris chose Venus over her, Ganymede took her place at Jove's table, and Carthage — her favorite city — is fated to fall to the descendants of the very man she is hunting. She cannot undo fate, but she can delay it, and she does so with storms, bribes, and a fury summoned from the underworld. Her vendetta is the poem's driving antagonism, and her eventual surrender is one of the strangest, saddest concessions in epic poetry.

Jove

When Venus comes to him weeping over her son's misfortunes, Jove answers with a prophecy that stretches from Aeneas's descendants to Augustus, settling the epic's outcome before it has properly begun. He is not a meddler like Juno or Venus; he is the guarantor of fate, the one voice that cannot be argued with. His calm is the counterweight to every divine tantrum in the poem, and his words give the reader something to hold onto while the mortals suffer.

Ascanius

Ascanius — also called Iulus — is the living proof that Aeneas's mission matters beyond his own lifetime, the heir whose descendants will build Alba Longa and eventually Rome. He appears at his father's side at altars and games, a boy being shaped into a symbol, and his youth makes the stakes of every battle feel personal. When Virgil needs to remind readers what Aeneas is protecting, he puts Ascanius in the frame.

Dido

Dido fled Tyre after her brother murdered her husband, and she has spent her reign turning a foreign shore into a thriving city — a ruler defined by grief she has refused to repeat. When Aeneas arrives and tells his story of Troy, she hears her own losses in his voice, and the vow she made to her dead husband begins to crack. Her tragedy is that she loves a man whose destiny is elsewhere, and the poem treats her with a sympathy that makes the second half of the epic feel like a wound.