the family of Priam as having incurred the hatred of Zeus, and predicts that AEneas and his descendants shall reign over the Trojans:  the race of Dardanus, beloved by Zeus more than all his other sons, would thus be preserved, since AEneas belonged to it.  Accordingly, when AEneas is in imminent peril from the hands of Achilles, Poseidon specially interferes to rescue him, and even the implacable miso-Trojan goddess Here assents to the proceeding.  These passages have been construed by various able critics to refer to a family of philo-Hellenic or semi-Hellenic AEneadae, known even in the time of the early singers of the Iliad as masters of some territory in or near the Troad, and professing to be descended from, as well as worshipping, AEneas.  In the town of Scepsis, situated in the mountainous range of Ida, about thirty miles eastward of Ilium, there existed two noble and priestly families who professed to be descended, the one from Hector, the other from AEneas.  The Scepsian critic Demetrius (in whose time both these families were still to be found) informs us that Scamandrius, son of Hector, and Ascanius, son of AEneas, were the archegets or heroic founders of his native city, which had been originally situated on one of the highest ranges of Ida, and was subsequently transferred by them to the less lofty spot on which it stood in his time.  In Arisbe and Gentinus there seem to have been families professing the same descent, since the same archegets were acknowledged.  In Ophrynium, Hector had his consecrated edifice, while in Ilium both he and AEneas were worshipped as gods:  and it was the remarkable statement of the Lesbian Menecrates that AEneas, “having been wronged by Paris and stripped of the sacred privileges which belonged to him, avenged himself by betraying the city, and then became one of the Greeks.”

One tale thus among many respecting AEneas, and that, too, the most ancient of all, preserved among natives of the Troad, who worshipped him as their heroic ancestor, was that after the capture of Troy he continued in the country as king of the remaining Trojans, on friendly terms with the Greeks.  But there were other tales respecting him, alike numerous and irreconcilable:  the hand of destiny marked him as a wanderer (fato profugus) and his ubiquity is not exceeded even by that of Odysseus.  We hear of him at AEnus in Thrace, in Pallene, at AEneia in the Thermaic Gulf, in Delos, at Orchomenus and Mantineia in Arcadia, in the islands of Cythera and Zacynthus, in Leucas and Ambracia, at Buthrotum in Epirus, on the Salentine peninsula and various other places in the southern region of Italy; at Drepana and Segesta in Sicily, at Carthage, at Cape Palinurus, Cumae, Misenum, Caieta, and finally in Latium, where he lays the first humble foundation of the mighty Rome and her empire.  And the reason why his wanderings were not continued still further was, that the oracles and the pronounced will of the gods directed him to settle in Latium.