In Search of Aeneas: Classical Myth or Bronze Age Hero?

by Anthony Adolph

Aeneas is one of the most prominent heroes who fought at Troy, as told in Homer’s Iliad, and he is the subject of Virgil’s Aeneid. Both works lie at the heart of western civilisation and are fantastic adventures involving love and war, journeys across wine-dark seas and the destruction and founding of cities.

Anthony Adolph analyses all the Greek and Roman myths about Aeneas to create the biography of a character who, though heavily fictionalised, may well have been a real person. In Search of Aeneas is essential reading for anyone interested in the links between classical mythology and ancient history, and the great empires of the Mediterranean.

The author transports the reader on a fabulous journey in Aeneas’s footsteps through the archaeological sites of the ancient world, from Troy to Rome. He cuts through the complexities of the classical texts and academic papers, explaining what they say about Aeneas in straightforward terms. By rooting the myths in real places, he makes them more comprehensible, especially for newcomers to the story.

Rather than be daunted by Aeneas as a semi-divine, mythological figure, Adolph has approached him as any genealogist should treat an ancestor, seeking to understand him in the context of his family and the era, and builds on the growing academic view that the core of the Iliad is based on real events.

569 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 15, 2023

About the author

I went to St George’s College, Weybridge; Durham University (studying Medieval history) and The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies, Canterbury, where I became a professional genealogist. I have been a freelance genealogist since 2003. I try to bring all my practical skills in historical and genealogical research to my writing, which I hope gives it an edge over many professional writers, who are not also day-to-day researchers. Besides research and writing I am also an occasional broadcaster. My most recent T.V. appearance was on the Australian version of Who Do You Think You Are? with Barry Humphries, the genius behind Dame Edna Everage. Although our interview appears in the middle of the program, it was actually the last bit of filming he ever did before his death. We shared a love of gardening, we discovered, and landscape painting. All of which is simply to show that good writers (like good entertainers) are not one-dimensional.

Reviews

[Petros Koutoupis · Rating 5 out of 5]

The mythical stories of Aeneas and his adventures in and from Troy have always fascinated me. His was a collection of tales of a demigod, the son of Anchises and Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans), who grappled with the task of finding his place in the ancient world; although, you wouldn’t know it, with Aeneas portraying himself to be more human than anything else, living through very human struggles. His tales were recited and repeated amongst the Greek communities of the Aegean and again, by the later Romans, throughout the entire Mediterranean.

Everything we know about Aeneas is preserved in the scattered and often contradictory fragments of the ancient Classical writers, excavated artifacts and the Virgilian epic in his name: The Aeneid. But what do we truly know about Aeneas, the mythical person and Aeneas, the hero? What would his life have looked like had he been a real historical character during the Late Bronze Age? How did his story evolve over time? Answering these very questions was the primary goal of renowned genealogist, Anthony Adolph, as he tackles the challenge of rediscovering Aeneas in his latest research “In Search of Aeneas: Classical Myth or Bronze Age Hero.”

I am just going to come out and say it: I enjoyed this book immensely. It felt like the author was piecing together an extremely complicated puzzle and doing so in such a way where you understood every step in the process. This publication is extremely well researched, almost too researched and I mean this in a positive way. I would go so far as to say that this is the authoritative guide to all things Aeneas. Two decades worth of research is distilled into this single 350-page tome.

But why focus on Aeneas? There are thousands of other mythological characters to write about. What made Aeneas so interesting to the ancients? The fact is, the entire Trojan Cycle was the Bible to the ancient Greeks and Romans. It taught them how to behave. It defined their values. The story of Aeneas though, was an incomplete one. He makes his appearance a couple of times in Homer’s Iliad and in each case, he is saved from death alluding to his destiny for something greater. And that is when the many non-Homeric stories were developed, to explain the fate of Aeneas after the Trojan War. Those fantastical stories circulated throughout the Mediterranean, eventually catching the interest of the Etruscans on mainland Italy and the Romans, to the South. We can observe this in early representations of Aeneas escaping Troy in Greek vase art to the many votive statuettes discovered throughout Etruria.

What happened then is not entirely clear but Rome did hijack his story, for the purpose of legitimizing the Augustan rule of imperial Rome. This form of propaganda, penned by Virgil, came out of the Julian family story in which, the family traced itself back to Iulius, a Roman invented name for Ascanius, thereby declaring Aeneas, the father of the Roman people and in turn, the Romans descendants of the great Trojan race. In the beginning it may have been gospel but over time, it became fact.

Anthony Adolph takes us on this journey as we dig through the clues that led to this point. I see parallels or at least some D.H. Lawrence influence. The author personally visits the majority of the ancient sites cited by the Classical writers, providing such meticulous details, leaving the reader with the feeling that they are physically there and standing beside him. We see what Anthony sees, even if it does not appear as it did in the time of Virgil.

And on this journey, we follow Aeneas from his childhood upbringing in the Dardanelles, through his last days in the Troad and the adventure that follows across the Mediterranean, until he reaches the Italian mainland.

Exhausting all sources at his disposal, we begin to understand why the ancients were so fascinated by this Trojan hero and why it was so important for ancient sites and ancient myth-makers to attach themselves to his story.

The book is divided into two major sections: (1) Aeneas as told by the Greeks and (2) Aeneas according to the Romans. Now, while the Romans adopted much of the tales surrounding this mythical hero from the Greeks, they expanded on it. Anthony Adolph makes this very apparent with his research. And as our journey comes to an end, we start to see the influence Aeneas had on early Christian writers and vice-versa.

Again, I found this publication to be very well researched and entertaining. If you have an interest in the mythical man behind the legend or Greco-Roman mythology, I highly recommend reading it.