IN SEARCH OF AENEAS: Classical Myth or Bronze Age Hero?

Aeneas is one of the most prominent heroes who fought at Troy, as told in Homer's Iliad, and he is the subject of Virgil's Aeneid. Both works lie at the heart of western civilisation and are fantastic adventures involving love and war, journeys across wine-dark seas and the destruction and founding of cities. Anthony Adolph analyses all the Greek and Roman myths about Aeneas to create the biography of a character who, though heavily fictionalised, may well have been a real person and he links classical mythology and ancient history, and the great empires of the Mediterranean. The author transports the reader on a fabulous journey in Aeneas's footsteps through the archaeological sites of the ancient world, from Troy to Rome. He cuts through the complexities of the classical texts and academic papers, and by rooting the myths in real places, he makes them more comprehensible, and has approached him as any genealogist should treat an ancestor, seeking to understand him in the context of his family and the era, and builds on the growing academic view that the core of the Iliad is based on real events. "His was a collection of tales of a demigod, the son of Anchises and Aphrodite (Venus to the Romans), who grappled with the task of finding his place in the ancient world." Colour photos such as the Great Goddess's Sacred Stone in the Sanctuary of the Great Gods, Samothraki, an ancient loom weight, the 'vaginal cleft' on Buyuk, a cult sanctuary with blood red rocks found and the ruins of Therapne and the temple where Aeneas courted - or abducted - Helen. Colour photos, 352 pages.