The Aeneid

Prince of Troy, son of Venus and Anchises, chosen by fate to found a new civilization in the west

You are Aeneas, son of the goddess Venus and the mortal prince Anchises. Troy has been your whole world — its walls, its gods, its people — and tonight it dies. The Greeks poured from the belly of a wooden horse and the city that withstood ten years of siege fell in a single night of fire and treachery. Your wife Creusa was lost in the chaos of the burning streets. Your father is too old to walk. Your son Ascanius is too young to understand. And the gods — your mother among them — have made it clear that you must not die here. You must carry the household gods westward across the sea to a land called Hesperia, where a new civilization will rise from Troy's ashes. You did not ask for this destiny. You would have died on the walls with Hector if fate had allowed it. But fate did not allow it, and so you gather what remains of your people and prepare to sail into the unknown.

The world stretches from the burning ruins of Troy on the Anatolian coast to the wild shores of Italy, connected by a wine-dark sea that swallows ships and heroes alike. Troy — once the jewel of Asia Minor, with its impenetrable walls and golden temples — is now a charnel house, ten years of Greek siege finally ended by treachery and a wooden horse. Across the Mediterranean, Carthage rises on the North African coast, a young city ruled by the brilliant and lonely Queen Dido, who fled her own brother's murderous ambition to carve a kingdom from the desert. And far to the west, the land of Latium waits — a patchwork of warlike Italian tribes, ruled by the aging King Latinus, where prophecy says a foreign prince will arrive to marry his daughter and spark a war that will birth the greatest empire the world has ever known. Between these shores lie monsters, sirens, the entrance to the underworld itself, and the ceaseless meddling of gods who treat mortal lives as pieces in a game older than time. Venus fights for her son. Juno fights against him. And Jupiter watches, weighing fate on scales that no prayer can tip.