Virgil's Aeneid - From Troy to Rome

As the power base of the ancient world shifted from Greece to Rome, many influences were carried from the latter to the former. So, in the same way that Greek Gods were adopted and modified by the Romans, Greek mythology formed the basis for many of their stories and dramas.

In the first century B.C., Virgil, drawing heavily on Homer, wrote the Aeneid, his epic of the founding of Rome. Virgil told how refugees from fallen Troy had migrated to Italy, where they became the ancestors of the Roman people.

The Aeneid transformed Homer’s Trojan losers into winners, presenting them as noble and long-suffering and the Greeks as devious and dangerous.

These notes are based on and extracted by permission from Dianne Thompson’s pages on the Northern Virginia Community College site TROY - Medieval Trojan Romance - http://novaonline.nvcc.edu/eli/Troy/troysites.html

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