Were the Romans Trojans?

Reading the title of this post—were the Romans Trojans?—you might be tempted to think it is some pseudo-historical hogwash. After all, what does the city of the Greek Age of Heroes have to do with the Italian metropolis?

If you ask a modern historian, the answer would be, “There is probably no connection between Romans and Trojans.” However, most Romans would have disagreed.

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Were the Romans Trojans?

At the height of the Bronze Age (~3200 years ago), Italy was a backwater, a place beyond the boundaries of the civilized world. The great powers of the time were Egypt and the Hittites, bordered by the city-states of the Fertile Crescent to the east and the burgeoning Mycenaean Greek civilization to the west.

When Mesopotamia’s fabulous stone and brick cities were already millennia old—some already ruined and forgotten—Italy was a land of untouched wilderness dotted with small villages. It is here the Trojan survivors found refuge, or so the story goes.

The Trojan War

A long time ago, when the world and Brat Pitt were still young, a legendary war took place between the Acheans (i.e., the Greeks) and the Trojans.

Please remember that these events occurred—if ever—700 years before the Battle of Thermopylae when 300 Spartans fought an army of Persians (and their pet mutant rhino, apparently) and 1200 years before Octavian Augustus became the first Roman Emperor. So, the clashing armies of the Trojan War numbered in their hundreds at best, and the city of Troy couldn’t have been larger than the size of a few city blocks.

As in any good story, there was a flirty wife, a jealous husband, countless heroes and antiheroes, and lots of action. Weary after a decade-long siege, the Acheans eventually decided to employ subterfuge.

Perhaps you heard the saying: “I fear Greeks, even those bearing gifts.” It originates from a line uttered by a Trojan priest in Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, regarding the following events.

The Trojan Horse

Pretending to retreat, the Acheans left a large wooden horse in front of the gates of Troy, supposedly as an offering to the goddess Athena. The naïve Trojans wheeled the horse into the city and began to celebrate their victory. Imagine their surprise when a host of Achean warriors poured out of the horse’s belly.

Long story short, the Acheans defeated the Trojans, destroyed their city, and massacred most of its populace.

Aeneas and the Survivors’ Move to Italy

In the aftermath of the war, Aeneas, a Trojan hero, gathered a group of survivors and fled. At the end of a years-long journey that took them to Sicily and Carthage, Aeneas and his people were finally welcomed on Western Italy’s coast in a land called Latium.

Here, Aeneas married Lavinia, daughter of Latinus, King of the Latins, and founded Lavinium, a port settlement a few kilometers south of the future city of Rome.

Have I mentioned that Aeneas’ mother was Venus, the goddess of love, among other things? You’ll be well advised to keep this in mind. A thousand and some years later, Gaius Julius Caesar claimed to descend from the gods precisely because of his supposed relation to Aeneas and his divine mother. But I digress.

When Latinus died in battle, his son-in-law took over as King of the Latins. When Aeneas himself was killed in war, his son Ascanius became king.

Ascanius, a.k.a. Julus (Caesar’s great-great-great…you got the idea), went on to found Alba Longa, which became an urbanized city-state. His descendants ruled Alba for 400 years until a pair of twins from the royal family, Romulus and Remus, founded Rome. But that’s a story for another time.

Is the Story of Aeneas True?

So, were the Romans Trojans? I seriously doubt that.

Historians can’t agree if Troy and the Trojan War even existed. Sure, several settlements in Anatolia could have been Troy. Some of them had probably clashed with the Acheans on one occasion or another. So, there was plenty of source material for the myths about the Trojan Wars.

But Paris and Helen, Menelaus and Achilles, the wooden horse, and all that stuff is probably nothing but literary fiction. The same goes for Aeneas and his adventures.

Yet, Italy was a kind of melting pot of that age: many people traded and mingled along its shores over the millennia. Why not also refugees from a disaster-struck city in Anatolia?

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if the founding myths of Rome are grounded in facts or not. What matters is that the Romans believed them. These stories shaped everything from their self-image to their laws and customs.

So, we will continue to explore these myths and their influence on the later Roman State and people.