Cast portrait: Ascanius

Reading Troy — cast portrait · Ascanius

This portrait is released the day Ascanius's arc peaks in the cycle, after Aeneid IX — Nisus and Euryalus. Read it as a coda — the full cross-cycle portrait, gathered after the moment.

Epics: Aeneid (Books 1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 12). First appearance: Aeneid 1.

Lineage and the double name

Ascanius is the son of Aeneas and Creusa, daughter of Priam — the only Trojan-blood child to survive the city's fall and reach the future Italy. He is a boy throughout the Aeneid: in Book 1 he is small enough for Venus to substitute Cupid for him without immediate detection; in Book 9 he has graduated to a beardless youth shooting his first arrow in war; in Book 12, at the duel of Aeneas and Turnus, he stands at the edge of the field as the implicit heir.

The double name is the Aeneid's most politically loaded onomastics. In Greek tradition he is Ascanius; in the Roman tradition Virgil writes for, he is also "Iulus" — and the gens Iulia, the family of Julius Caesar and his adopted son Augustus, claimed descent from him. Virgil's poem is in part a verse genealogy for Augustus, and Ascanius is the joint at which the genealogy turns from Trojan past to Roman future. The boy is the bridge.

Across the Aeneid

In Book 1 Venus replaces him with Cupid in disguise to kindle Dido's love for Aeneas — the boy is the unwitting instrument of the love that will destroy a queen. In Book 2 he flees the burning city beside his father, his small hand in Aeneas's larger one — the canonical image of Trojan pietas, son carried (Anchises on shoulder), son led (Iulus by the hand). In Book 4 he is the boy Mercury invokes to shame Aeneas into leaving Carthage: "Think of Iulus's expected kingdom — what will you steal from him?" In Book 5, at the funeral games for Anchises, he leads the lusus Troiae — the famous mock-cavalry of Trojan boys, the ceremonial ancestor of Augustan equestrian games. In Book 7, after the fleet has landed in Italy, his careless jest at dinner ("we are eating our tables!") fulfils the prophecy of the Harpies and confirms they have arrived at the fated land. The same book has his other catastrophic act: he shoots Silvia's pet stag during a hunt, and this single arrow ignites the Italian war that fills the second half of the poem.

In Book 9 he kills his first man in battle — Numanus Remulus, who had been jeering at Trojan effeminacy. Apollo descends to praise the boy and forbid him from fighting more that day, declaring his future. In Book 12 he watches the duel of his father and Turnus that decides everything.

After the Aeneid

Tradition (which Virgil hints at but does not stage) makes Ascanius the founder of Alba Longa, the parent city of Rome — he reigns there for thirty years before passing the kingdom to his son Silvius. Romulus and Remus, three centuries later, are his descendants. He is therefore the cycle's quietest world-historical figure: the small boy who walked out of Troy carrying nothing, and whose great-great-(many-greats)-grandsons founded Rome.

Across the cycle

Ascanius is named in Iliad 13.792 and 15.546 as a Phrygian ally — but that is a different Ascanius, a homonym. The cycle's relevant Ascanius is Virgil's; he appears nowhere else in our four texts. But he is the cycle's clearest argument for genealogy as plot. The Iliadic prophecy at Iliad 20.307–08 that Aeneas would survive and his sons rule the Trojans is the genealogical seed Virgil grows into a Roman foundation epic. Without Ascanius, the prophecy stops at Aeneas; with Ascanius, it reaches Augustus.

The scholarship

The "Iulus" name is one of the clearest examples in Latin literature of dynastic mythography in the service of contemporary politics. Whether Virgil endorsed or quietly undermined this is the central question of Aeneid studies. Read Ascanius as the cycle's bridge from Bronze Age catastrophe to Augustan present.

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This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.