So a couple of different things to disentangle here: the Aeneid and its relationship to previous Roman tradition, the Aeneid and its relationship to the larger corpus of the Greek epic tradition, Romans and Greeks, and how Aeneas ends up in Rome to begin with (in particular, we need to pretty seriously examine the idea that this tradition emerges because the Romans “wanted” a Trojan founder).

It will probably be helpful on this one to start with Aeneas and build from there, because it’s important to keep in mind that while Aeneas takes on a renewed importance in Augustan Rome, the tradition of Aeneas’ wanderings as Roman foundation story substantially predates that period. The story of a Trojan origin for Rome emerges by the mid-Republican period, and different versions of Aeneas’ travels around the Mediterranean had circulated long before that. This is important, because the Aeneas myth follows a familiar pattern of Hellenization in the ancient Mediterranean: as Greek colonization spread, the Greeks in those colonies took Hellenizing myths with them, a way of turning non-Greek places Greek by connecting them with the existing tradition of Greek heroes. After all, even if a new area wasn’t Greek, if Greek heroes had visited, it was still part of the same world. Jason, Herakles, Aeneas: all of these were heroes who traveled, including outside of Greece itself. And what we tend to see is that places where these heroes supposedly went, hero cults followed, even in places that weren’t actually Greek (Jason and the Black Sea area, etc.). Non-Greek peoples adopted and adapted Greek stories about their cities into their own traditions, not just at Rome but around the Mediterranean. And Rome was just one of many places Aeneas supposedly founded - these stories gained new variations as they went and changed over time. So it’s not so much that Rome or anywhere else “chose” a founder, like they could just head down to the store and pick someone they thought was really cool. There existed a much larger tradition that was already circulating the Hellenic world (and for pretty much all of Rome’s early history, it is part of the Hellenic world, even when direct contact is minimal), a tradition which was in part about Italy, and the Romans integrated it into their own local tradition.

And okay, sure, you might say, but Aeneas isn’t Greek. Why pick a Trojan? When this question shows up, there’s always a degree of bafflement here. Why go with the loser? Who wants the hero who got duped? Neither the Romans adopting the story nor the Greeks who circulated it to begin with saw it in those terms. The Trojan War was part of the Greeks’ heroic past, and even if they were fighting against them, the Trojans were part of that too. Being descended from a group that had a part in that heroic past still gave them a part of that tradition. Aeneas, even as a Trojan, was still a hero, and had a past recognized by the Greek tradition. Those things were infinitely more important than who won or lost the war he was fighting. So it’s less about whether the Romans loved or hated the Greeks - that relationship is actually somewhat complicated - and more that in a highly Hellenized Mediterranean Rome adopted a tradition which gave them a place in Hellenic conceptions of the world and tied them to other communities they were interacting with.

To wrap up, I did just want to say a quick word on the Aeneid itself, since you’ve mentioned it specifically. Augustus’ connection with the Aeneas story and the reason for its increased importance during that era has to do with his family, the gens Iulia, which had long claimed Trojan ancestry and connected itself to the story long before Julius Caesar and his heir rolled around. Aeneas’ connection with Rome doesn’t start with Augustus, but it sure does become a very big deal because of him. Vergil, writing in that period, is adapting a lot of earlier material, not just in the foundation story itself but also practices from his literary predecessors. Vergil’s Latin models, in particular, had already started the process of creating a poetic version of Roman history that integrated Greek models and the Greek tradition with Roman history specifically using Aeneas as a focal point. So Vergil is adapting the story, yes, and making it into something new, a bit, but the practice of drawing Greek myth into the Roman world wasn’t anything new and neither was this specific myth.

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