Legends occupy an uncertain territory between lived experience and imagination. Across the ancient world, people explained their origins through stories that blended fragments of history with self-conscious invention. Sometimes these traditions preserve genuine echoes of the past: archaeological discoveries at sites once dismissed as mythical, such as ancient Troy itself, have shown that beneath the layers of poetry there can indeed lie traces of historical reality. Yet legends can also reveal more about the societies that tell them than about the events they supposedly describe. They express the aspirations, fears, ambitions and identity of the people who weaved those tales. Few examples illustrate this more clearly than the Roman claim to Trojan ancestry — the belief that the people who built the Roman Republic and later the Roman Empire were descended from refugees who escaped the destruction of Troy after the legendary Trojan War. It is something my students ask frequently: is it true?
For centuries, educated Romans accepted, celebrated and elaborated this tradition. According to the received version of the story, the Trojan prince Aeneas fled the burning city carrying his aged father Anchises on his shoulders and leading his young son Ascanius by the hand. A few survivors, the handful of Trojans citizens who had not been killed by the Greeks, went with him. After years of wandering across the Mediterranean sea, a handful of travel-weary and traumatised survivors arrived in Italy, where Aeneas’s descendants would eventually establish the line leading to Romulus, the founder of Rome. The myth became one of the foundational narratives of Roman civilisation, immortalised most famously in the Aeneid, composed by Virgil during the reign of Augustus in the late first century BC.
The question that many of my students ask is whether there was any truth behind the story. Were the Romans genuinely descended from refugees from Asia Minor (modern Turkey), or was the claim merely a literary invention that helped the Romans to ally themselves with the ancient Greek heroic tradition that they so admired? Modern historians overwhelmingly regard the Trojan ancestry of Rome as mythical, yet the myth itself remains historically significant precisely because it reveals so much about Roman identity and about the ways that civilisations construct their own past and define their own identity.
The roots of the story stretch back into the complex cultural world of the early Mediterranean. The city of Troy, located in north-western Anatolia near the Dardanelles in modern Turkey, was long thought by many scholars to be entirely fictional, the invention of Greek epic poetry. That changed dramatically in the 19th century, when excavations led by Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the remains of a substantial ancient settlement at Hisarlik, now widely identified as the site of Troy and a UNSECO world heritage site. Archaeology has demonstrated that several cities occupied the site over many centuries, and one layer appears to have suffered destruction during the Late Bronze Age, roughly corresponding to the traditional period assigned to the Trojan War. Although historians remain cautious about treating Homeric poetry as literal history, there is now broad agreement that the legends of Troy’s destruction probably contain at least the distant memories of a real conflict in the eastern Mediterranean during the Bronze Age.
Yet even if Troy itself was real, that does not mean that the Romans were descended from Trojans. The earliest inhabitants of Latium, the region around Rome, were Italic peoples who spoke Latin, an Indo-European language closely related to other regional dialects. Archaeological evidence indicates a continuity of settlement and gradual social development in central Italy rather than the arrival of a conquering or colonising population from Anatolia. Early Roman culture seems to have emerged from interactions among Latins, Sabines, Etruscans and other Italian peoples over several centuries. There is no concrete evidence for a mass migration of Anatolians to Italy.
The Trojan story appears instead to have developed gradually through contact with Greek culture. From the 8th century BC, Greek colonies spread across southern Italy and Sicily, bringing Greek language, religion and literature into close contact with the peoples of the Italian peninsula. As Rome grew in power, Roman elites became increasingly fascinated by Greek civilisation. Greek mythology provided a rich reservoir of heroic narratives through which emerging states could interpret their origins and ambitions. As I like to point out to my students, every educated Roman would have been steeped in the language and the stories of Homer, in a similar fashion to how the educated elite were steeped in the bible during the Renaissance. The heoric stories were central to the identity of every well-informed Roman.
Aeneas appeared as a relatively minor figure in Greek epic tradition, long before the Romans adopted him. In Homer’s Iliad, he is presented as a Trojan noble favoured by the gods and destined to survive the war. Greek writers later elaborated stories about his wanderings after the fall of Troy, and by the 6th century BC some traditions had linked him with settlements in Italy. The Romans eventually embraced and transformed these stories into a national identity.
This transformation reached its most influential form under Augustus. Emerging victorious from decades of civil war, Augustus sought not only political authority but ideological legitimacy. Rome needed a story to explain both its greatness and its suffering. Virgil’s Aeneid supplied that story with extraordinary literary power. Written between approximately 29 and 19 BC and (we think, at least) at the behest of Augustus, the poem deliberately echoed Homer while presenting Rome under Augustus as the culmination of a divine historical destiny.
In Virgil’s telling, Aeneas embodies virtues that the Romans admired deeply: duty, endurance, piety and self-sacrifice. He is not merely a wandering exile but the chosen instrument of fate. The sufferings of Troy become the prelude to Rome’s future empire. Jupiter himself promises that from Aeneas’s descendants will arise a people destined to rule the world, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos: to show mercy to those that submit and to grind down the resistors in war. The poem thus transformed a refugee narrative into a self-conscious justification of imperial rule.
The political usefulness of this mythology was immense. Augustus claimed descent through his adoptive family, the Julii, from Aeneas’s son Ascanius, also somewhat handily known, we are told, as Iulus, a monumentally twisted fudge by Virgil, which has always amised me. Since Aeneas was said to be the son of the goddess Venus, the Julian line acquired divine ancestry, which Augustus referenced in his statuary and architecture. It elevated him above ordinary politics and linked the new imperial regime with a sacred and thus unquestionable destiny. In this sense, the Trojan myth functioned less as objective history than as ideological theatre, something which Augustus and those around him turned out to be phenomenally good at. Yet it would be mistaken to dismiss the myth simply as cynical propaganda. The Romans genuinely cared about ancestry and tradition, and many educated Romans seem to have accepted the Trojan story sincerely, or at least treated it as culturally meaningful.
Ancient attitudes toward myth differed considerably from modern expectations of historical accuracy. Myth and history were not always sharply separated categories. A story could be morally, spiritually or politically “true” even if its factual basis was uncertain. Roman authors occasionally displayed scepticism about legendary traditions, but they rarely rejected them outright. The historian Livy, writing during Augustus’s reign, admitted the uncertainty surrounding Rome’s earliest past while still recounting the traditional narratives. In the preface to his history of Rome, he observed that accounts of the remote past are “more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the genuine records of the historian.” Yet he proceeded to include them because they formed part of Rome’s cultural inheritance.
The appeal of Trojan ancestry also reflected Rome’s complicated relationship with Greece. Roman elites admired Greek art, philosophy, literature and education profoundly. At the same time, Rome was busy conquering the Greek world and often sought to define itself as distinct from and superior to Greek culture and its values. Claiming Trojan descent offered an elegant solution to this cultural cognitive dissonance. The Trojans belonged to the heroic universe of Greek epic, granting Rome prestigious ancient connections, but they were not themselves Greek: in fact, within Homeric tradition, they were indeed the enemies of the Greeks. Rome could therefore position itself as both heir to and rival of Greek civilisation. There may also even have been diplomatic advantages to the myth. Throughout antiquity, claims of shared ancestry could shape alliances and political relationships. Roman leaders sometimes invoked Trojan connections when dealing with eastern Mediterranean cities that traced their own histories back to the Trojan world. Mythology could function as a form of soft power long before the modern term existed.
Modern scholarship has approached the Trojan question from several directions, including archaeology, linguistics, comparative mythology and most recently genetics. None has produced convincing evidence that supports a literal Trojan origin for the Romans. Linguistic evidence is particularly important. The language associated with Bronze Age Troy remains uncertain, although scholars often connect the region with Anatolian languages such as Luwian, which belonged to a separate branch of the Indo-European language family. Latin, by contrast, evolved firmly within the Italic branch of languages. This strongly suggests that the ancestors of the Romans developed within the Italian peninsula rather than migrating from Anatolia in historical times.
Modern genetic studies likewise indicate that the population of ancient Italy was shaped by complex patterns of migration and interaction extending over millennia. Like most Mediterranean peoples, the Romans emerged from multiple layers of ancestry. While it is entirely possible that individuals from Anatolia reached Italy through trade, warfare, slavery or selective migration, there is no evidence for a distinct founding population. The Mediterranean was interconnected long before Rome’s rise and human mobility was common. But this broad interconnectedness differs greatly from the dramatic national migration imagined by Rome’s foundational myth.
Myths are not rendered meaningless simply because they are not literally true. In many respects, the Roman belief in their Trojan ancestry accomplished precisely what successful national myths are meant to accomplish: it gave people a shared story about who they were and why their civilisation mattered. The myth linked suffering with destiny, exile with triumph and destruction with renewal. Troy’s fall became the necessary precondition for Rome’s greatness and gave people the hope that greatness can come from indescribable suffering. This theme resonated powerfully with Roman political culture, especially during periods of upheaval, of which there were many. The late Republic had witnessed civil wars, assassinations and social collapse. Virgil’s description of survivors who carried the memory of a ruined homeland toward a future empire possessed enormous emotional force: it allowed the Romans to imagine their hardships as part of a larger, providential narrative.
The endurance of the Trojan myth also reflects the extraordinary influence of Virgil’s poetry. The Aeneid became one of the foundational texts of European civilisation and has been studied continuously for two thousand years. Medieval and Renaissance writers treated Aeneas not merely as a fictional character but as a symbolic ancestor of European political order. Even in modern times, the image of Aeneas fleeing Troy remains one of antiquity’s most recognisable scenes.
Legends rarely survive for millennia unless they speak to something deeper than mere fact. The Roman Trojan myth endured not because it accurately described population movements in the Bronze Age, but because it expressed how the Romans understood themselves. Like many origin stories, it blurred memory, imagination, politics and poetry into a narrative powerful enough to outlive the empire that created it.
