Aeneas.
    The legendary founder of the Roman race, Aeneas was the son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite (Venus). As a child, he was cared for by a nymph of Mount Ida and was educated by the centaur Chiron. He fought valiantly during the Trojan War, but fled the devastated city when it burned. After many adventures, the most famous of which was his infatuation with Queen Dido at Carthage, Aeneas finally settled in Latium in Italy, where he married Lavinia, daughter of King Latinus of Latium.
    Aeneas appears as a secondary character in the Iliad, but he becomes an epic hero in Virgil’si>Aeneid, written to inspire Augustus and the Romans under his empire. Much of Virgil’s narrative closely parallels Homer’s Odyssey. While the Aeneid ends with Aeneas’s slaying of his rival, Turnus, other Roman works continue the hero’s saga, detailing his later meeting with Dido’s sister, Anna, and his eventual apotheosis.