Roman descent from Aeneas and the Trojans was entrenched within Latin historiography from its inception. While the Roman connection to Aeneas becomes very important in the early imperial period because of the family - the Julii - that came to claim descent from Aeneas personally (you may have heard of Julius Caesar or perhaps his adopted heir Augustus), the origins of Rome’s claim to Trojan ancestry actually dates back much further, to the very earliest days of Latin Literature, when a new national historiography is still emerging.

If you’re interested at all in Latin literary history, it’s difficult to overstate the import and the impact of this period. A true capital-L Literature in Latin comes into being quite abruptly in the year 240 BCE at the Ludi Romani when a Greek writer by the name of Livius Andronicus translates an unknown play from Greek into Latin. What follows is a massive undertaking: Latin authors build - from the ground up - a national literature in their own language and they do so in a way that frames Latin literature as an extension of Greek literature and thus Roman culture as an extension of Greek culture. Feeney notes that:

modern readers are so used to Romans writing in this way that it requires a conscious effort to apprehend what an extraordinary phenomenon is actually at issue here. (3)

While Feeney is commenting on literature specifically, we should keep his words in the back of our minds while we discuss Roman mythological history as well; that the Romans would graft their entire history onto the Greek Homeric model is completely unprecedented and bafflingly improbable.

Even before the third century BCE, there was already a fairly extensive Greek tradition to work from regarding Aeneas and stories about Aeneas’ travels circulated around the Mediterranean. And while, on its own, Roman descent from the Trojans doesn’t seem to be Greek, the Homeric connection is (and so is the Roman tendency to adopt a Greek cultural model for their own). If you’re interested in some of the variant traditions, in the first century BCE Dionysius of Halicarnassus gives a fairly length treatment of the mythological history (1.45-71), including a partial survey of the traditions in which Aeneas does not end up in Italy (in one he even returns to Troy and becomes king there) and what he considers to be proof of the version he thinks is the right one (Aeneas goes to Italy). By that time, a number of cults and landmarks claimed to have been part of Aeneas’ journey, so we can see how the mythic journey became fused onto real geography.

But it was in the third and second centuries BCE that the early writers of Roman historiography made this tradition part of the foundation of Roman mythological history. The first author to draw the Homeric world into the Roman sphere was also the first person to model Latin literature off of Greek: Livius Andronicus, in an Odissia of which we have surviving fragments. Andronicus’ Odissia translated Homer, but probably not in the way we think of direct translation. Andronicus used local Italic deities in lieu of an invocation to the Muses, for instance, and set his poem in Saturnians, a native Italic meter. Biggs (2020) notes that Andronicus’ practice of Italicizing and Latinizing Homer and his use of familiar locations brought the story of the Odyssey into the contemporary Roman world and argues that Andronicus creates a model of allegorical history that is expanded upon by Gnaeus Naevius and Ennius in their own Latin verse historiography (at this point, Latin has no prose historiography - that comes later).

Not only were Greek models attractive to Latin authors looking to create a new national literature (Feeney and Goldberg both explore that process if you’re interested in digging deeper, taking two very different approaches to it), there was a further connection between the Roman world of the Second Punic War and the Homeric world of Odysseus and Aeneas: the sea. Leigh argues that the Second Punic War was Rome’s “maritime moment” and that Romans of the third century would have recognized their own sea expeditions against the Carthaginians in the wanderings of Odysseus in Livius Andronicus’ Odissia. Biggs (2017) argues that Naevius’ Bellum Punicum, a verse history of Rome written in Saturnians, makes an even more explicit connection between Aeneas’ maritime wanderings and Rome’s “maritime moment”. He argues that in the Bellum Punicum Naevius’ Aeneas is represented as sailing Rome’s first ship, built with the divine assistance of Mercury, a parallel to the fleet constructed during the First Punic War which Polybius calls the Romans’ first fleet. The Bellum Punicum was the first Latin epic, starting its narrative with Aeneas and Roman prehistory and going all the way up to Naevius’ own time, and it in turn heavily influenced Ennius’ Annales, another work of verse historiography, this one written in the Greek quantitative meter dactylic hexameter, only a generation later. Both start their epic historical narratives with Aeneas, cementing his place at the beginning of Roman prehistory.

Naevius and Ennius were in the middle of a collective project - still on the heels of the very first works of written literature in Latin - of creating a national literary canon for Rome in Latin and, with it, a national history worthy of that literature.

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Biggs, Thomas. “Allegory and Authority in Latin Verse Historiography.” In Ennius’ Annals*: Poetry and History*. Edited by Cynthia Damon and Joseph Farrell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 91-106.

___________. “Primus Romanorum: Origin Stories, Fictions of Primacy, and the First Punic War.” Classical Philology 112 (2017): 350-367.

Feeney, Denis. Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Goldberg, Sander. Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic: Poetry and its Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Leigh, Matthew. “Early Roman Epic and the Maritime Moment.” Classical Philology 105 (2010): 265-80.