rome was not founded by the romans. or, at the very least, that was not the story the romans wished to tell about themselves. the most powerful empire of antiquity built its entire founding mythology on an imported genealogy: one that bound it not to the tribes of italy, but to the most celebrated city of the greek world, troy.
if we could travel back to the 1st century bce and ask any ordinary citizen where his people came from, he would not speak of shepherds in latium. he would tell us he descended from aeneas, the trojan prince who, after seeing his city laid waste by the greeks, hoisted his aged father onto his shoulders and fled across the mediterranean until he landed on the shores of italy.
the awkward question is why a power on the rise should wish to claim, as its grandfathers, the losers of a war. the answer is prestige. for centuries the world surrounding rome had spoken and thought in greek: philosophy, epic, theatre, sculpture — the entire canon of what was then understood as civilisation came from the east. against that overwhelming inheritance, the early romans cut the figure of country yokels with no heroic past. it is worth qualifying the notion that rome “hated” greece: the prevailing attitude of the elite was not contempt but admiration mixed with rivalry — the hellenophilia that horace would later distil in his line graecia capta ferum victorem cepit, “captive greece took captive her savage conqueror” — with hostile voices, such as cato the elder, very much in the minority. within that frame, adopting aeneas was a masterstroke. it allowed rome to hitch itself to the most famous epic of antiquity and rise to the level of greek prestige, but to enter by a side door: that of troy, the historic enemy of the greeks.
augustus did not merely conquer rome’s future: he rewrote its past in order to make himself untouchable.
the chronicles thus wove together an entire lineage, yet modern scholarship has not found a single piece of archaeological evidence for trojan settlements in central italy. the myth of aeneas is not memory: it is construction. and a construction far older than augustus: the trojan legend was already circulating among the greeks from the 5th century bce and took root in rome with its first annalists, naevius and fabius pictor; the gens iulia itself laid claim to its divine descent from venus much earlier, when julius caesar proclaimed it in the funeral eulogy of his aunt julia (suetonius, julius 6) in 68 bce. augustus did not invent it: he inherited it and gave it a very specific moment of political acceleration. after decades of civil wars, octavian emerged victorious and became augustus, the first emperor in everything but name. to sustain himself he needed more than legions: he needed his power to appear inscribed in the very order of things.
the instrument was literature. under augustus’s patronage — channelled through his counsellor maecenas, in whose circle virgil was already a celebrated poet — the aeneid was born. philologists are right to note that the idea of a direct, literal commission from the emperor is disputed; what is certain is that the poem flourished under that patronage and served its ends. virgil established that aeneas was the son of the goddess venus. and since the family of augustus, the gens iulia, claimed descent from aeneas through his son iulus, the chain closed upon itself: if the ancestor was the son of a goddess, the emperor’s power was no usurpation but an inherited divine mandate.
the ambition of the operation is dizzying. augustus was not content to dominate his present: he repurposed the very origin of rome to inscribe his own dynasty within it. he established that the trojan lineage had survived in italy century after century, passing through kings and republics, until it arrived precisely at him. the lie, if we wish to call it that, was less a crude falsification than a carefully wrought state fiction: a story so well made that for two thousand years europe read it as history.
that is the true legacy of aeneas. he did not found rome — no trojan founded it — but he founded the idea rome had of itself: that of a people destined by the gods, heir to a more ancient and more noble world. from that mythic root would soon spring the next layer of the legend, far more sordid and far more roman: that of two twins abandoned in the tiber, condemned to die, from whose blood the city would be born.
