Ascanius- Roman HeroHero"Founder of Alba Longa"

The Flight from Troy

In the Aeneid, the night Troy fell, Aeneas hoisted old Anchises onto his shoulders with the household gods clutched to his chest, took Ascanius by the hand, and plunged into the burning streets. The boy's small steps could barely keep pace. Behind them, Creusa followed. Somewhere in the smoke and chaos, she vanished. Her shade appeared to Aeneas afterward, urging him westward to a new kingdom. Ascanius never saw his mother again.

Who his mother was depended on who told the story. Virgil and Apollodorus name Creusa, Priam's daughter. Livy acknowledges the uncertainty, noting that some traditions made Ascanius the son of Lavinia, Aeneas's Italian wife, born in Latium rather than Troy. Cato placed his birth before the war entirely. Dionysius of Halicarnassus recorded communities that gave Aeneas two sons, both named Ascanius, by different mothers.

The Wandering Years

At Carthage, Venus used her grandson to snare Queen Dido. Cupid took the boy's form, sat on Dido's lap during a feast, and breathed divine desire into her while the real Ascanius slept unknowing in one of Venus's groves. The passion Cupid kindled would consume Dido on a pyre.

In Sicily, where the fleet sheltered at King Acestes's court, the Trojan women set fire to the ships. Years at sea with no home in sight had broken them, and they chose destruction over another voyage. Ascanius rode through the camp calling on them to stop. Several ships burned beyond saving, but enough survived to carry the remnants on to Italy.

The Italian Wars

When war broke out in Latium between the Trojans and the forces of Turnus, Ascanius proved himself. The Latin warrior Numanus Remulus stood before the Trojan camp and shouted that these eastern newcomers were soft, perfumed, unfit for Italian soil. Ascanius drew his bow and put an arrow through him.

Apollo descended to praise the shot. He called Ascanius son of gods and ancestor of gods, then told him to leave the fighting. His destiny was not the battlefield. It was what came after.

Founding of Alba Longa

After Aeneas's death, which Ovid describes as his transformation into the god Indiges on the banks of the Numicus, Ascanius ruled Lavinium for thirty years. This was the span foretold by the omen that had greeted the Trojans on landing: a white sow nursing thirty piglets at the destined site, one for each year before the next city would rise.

When the thirtieth year came, Ascanius left Lavinium and founded Alba Longa in the Alban Hills. Livy says the population had outgrown the original settlement. Dionysius of Halicarnassus records that Lavinia, pregnant with Aeneas's posthumous son Silvius, feared Ascanius and fled into the forests, where Silvius was born among shepherds. The two lines were later reconciled. It was the Silvian branch that held the Alban throne through the long centuries between Ascanius and Romulus.