The myth that Rome was founded by the Trojans doesn’t date all the way back to Rome's founding, but it is already established there by the time literary culture starts to develop at Rome in the 3rd century BCE. The diffusion of Trojan foundation myths - even those that appear among non-Greek cultures, like Rome - through the ancient Mediterranean is tied to Greek colonization and the spread of Hellenic culture, although they were widely adopted by local groups.

As Greek speaking people traveled around and colonized the ancient Mediterranean, they took Greek narratives with them, adapting their own Hellenocentric myths to new places and fitting them to foreign landscapes, in this way mapping mythic history onto real-world geography. In Magna Graecia and Sicily especially, Greeks used familiar myths as a way of understanding unfamiliar places and integrating the larger Mediterranean world into the Greek historical model.

While not all of the Greek heroes whose stories were used in this way were actually themselves Greeks - Aeneas was not - they were still part of an Hellenic heroic past. Aeneas, whose wanderings were well established and well known, made an excellent candidate for new foundation legends (as did heroes like Jason and Hercules with similar wanderings), and a wide number of different variants on his travels circulated the ancient Mediterranean, only one of which is that he ended up in Italy.

And although these myths had Hellenic origins, they were widely adopted around the Mediterranean by non-Hellenic peoples, like the Romans, who took the opportunity to sync up their own local histories with the Hellenic historical and heroic past. Local cults and legends about these heroes sprang up from the Black Sea to Italy, showing that these legends were received and integrated into local traditions. These legends connected people and cultures in the highly multicultural world of the ancient Mediterranean, adapting themselves easily from Greek stories about the places they visited to the foundation legends of the people they encountered.

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Bérard, Jean. La colonisation de l’Italie méridionale et de la Sicile dans l’antiquité: l’histoire et la légende. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
Erskine, Andrew. Troy Between Greece and Rome: Local Tradition and Imperial Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.