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The Hero In Virgil's The Aeneid

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In Virgil’s The Aeneid, Aeneas is cast into the main role as the leader of what’s left of the Trojan people. Many people in his position are presented as heroes like Odysseus and Hercules, accomplishing and doing great deeds, but can Aeneas be considered a hero? Taking into consideration the parts of the Aeneid, book six and book twelve, can give some insight and examples into why Aeneas may just be an indirect hero and a pawn used by the gods.
When first reading book four I saw Aeneas in a negative light. They way he left Dido, breaking her heart, to go to Italy after they had been married (in Dido’s eyes) just seemed cruel and uncalled for. Though, after finishing The Aeneid I see Aeneas as neither a bad nor good man. The gods were the driving force of everything that happened behind Aeneas’s actions. Take for example Dido and Aeneas’s marriage. Juno, the wife of Jupiter had looked down and saw that Dido was fond of Aeneas and decided to have them married “in order to …show more content…

Until the Rutulians saw “the tawny eagle of Jupiter in the red sky morning…seized a noble swan in his pitiless talons…and [with] the weight of his prey…[dropped] it out of its talons into the river” (book 12, 271). They took this as an omen from Jupiter to continue the battle with the Trojans. It was the once again the gods who set the actions of men back on tract to fulfill their needs.
During the fight a spear hit Aeneas giving him a wound that his healer could not fix. He shouldn’t have been able to go back on the battlefield to fight and kill Turnus, but his mother, Venus, saved him. After reading book four and twelve of The Aeneid, it is determined that Aeneas is neither a good or bad character or considered a hero. He is just caught up in the will of the gods with them intervening in every step he makes. Being born on Venus he just happened to be the perfect pawn to do the gods

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