Chapter summary
Aeneas continues the account he gives Dido at the banquet in Carthage. With Troy destroyed, signs from the gods tell the survivors to seek deserted lands, without saying which. At Antandros they build a fleet, and Anchises tells them to trust their sails to the fates. Aeneas leaves weeping, with his son Ascanius, his companions and the Penates, the household gods he saved from the fire.
In Thrace, an old ally of Troy, Aeneas begins a city. When he pulls up branches to cover an altar, he sees a bush drip blood, and from the grave comes the voice of Polydorus, son of Priam. His father had sent him to Thrace with much gold when Troy seemed lost, and the Thracian king, seeing the Trojans' fortune end, killed the boy and kept the gold. Polydorus begs Aeneas to flee. Terrified, Aeneas takes the matter to the chiefs and to his father, and they all decide to leave a land stained by the violation of hospitality.
At Delos, Aeneas asks the god Apollo for a home and a clear answer. The earth shakes, and the god's voice tells the Trojans to seek the ancient mother, the land that first bore them. Anchises, recalling the tradition of their ancestors, concludes that it is Crete, from where Teucer, ancestor of the Trojans, came. Aeneas founds a city there, but a plague kills men and crops. Anchises tells his son to go back to the oracle, but first the Penates appear to Aeneas in a dream, by moonlight, and say that the promised land is Hesperia, Italy, from which Dardanus, founder of the line, came. Anchises admits he was wrong about the Trojans' double ancestry, and remembers that only Cassandra spoke of Hesperia, without being believed.
A storm blots out the sky for three days, until the pilot Palinurus loses his course. They reach the Strophades, islands of the Harpies, and seeing cattle loose, they kill the beasts and set the table, but the Harpies swoop down from the mountains, snatch the food and foul it. The Trojans attack the birds, but the feathers cannot be wounded. Celaeno, the Harpy who speaks, accuses the Trojans of wanting war, after killing the oxen, against those who did them no offense. She says she repeats a word of Apollo: they will reach Italy, but they will wall in their city only when hunger and the outrage of their slaughter force them to gnaw their own tables. Anchises, with hands raised, asks the gods to turn away the threat, and they flee.
At Buthrotum they hear the rumor that Helenus, son of Priam, reigns there, married to Andromache, the widow of Hector. Aeneas goes to meet him and finds her offering funeral rites at an empty tomb of Hector. Seeing the armed Trojans, she faints and asks whether he is alive. She tells how she was a slave of Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, who passed her to Helenus, and how Helenus inherited part of the kingdom when Orestes killed Pyrrhus. Helenus welcomes the visitors into a little Troy.
Aeneas asks the seer to tell him the dangers to avoid, because the gods order him to head for Italy, and only Celaeno has announced a terrible hunger. Helenus says Italy is farther than Aeneas thinks, and gives him a sign for the site of the city, a white sow with thirty piglets by the bank of a river. He orders them to skirt Sicily on the left, to escape Scylla and Charybdis, to pray to Juno with humility, and to consult the Sibyl of Cumae. He warns that the Parcae and Juno forbid him to say more. Andromache gives Ascanius embroidered garments, because he reminds her of her Astyanax. Aeneas takes his leave, promising that the two cities will be one Troy in their hearts.
At dawn Aeneas sights Italy. Near a temple of Minerva, he sees four white horses, and Anchises reads war in them, but recalls that the same horses draw the chariot, and so there is also hope of peace. Following Helenus, they pray to Argive Juno with their heads covered. Near Sicily they hear the roar of Charybdis, which Anchises recognizes from Helenus's description. Palinurus turns left, and then the wind abandons them, and they arrive, without knowing it, at the coast of the Cyclopes, beside Etna in eruption.
In the morning a haggard man comes out of the woods and throws himself on his knees before the Trojans. He is Achaemenides, a Greek from Ithaca, left behind in Polyphemus's cave when Odysseus's companions fled. He asks to be taken to any land, or to be thrown into the sea, preferring to die at the hands of men. Anchises gives him his hand as a sign of safety, and Achaemenides warns that many Cyclopes are on the coast. At that moment Polyphemus appears, blind, going to wash his wound in the sea. The Trojans take in the suppliant, cut the cable in silence and row. The Cyclops's cry makes the sea tremble. Aeneas, recalling Helenus's warning, decides to turn back so as not to fall between Scylla and Charybdis, and the north wind, coming from the strait of Pelorus, carries him south, far from danger.
Sailing along Sicily, they reach Drepanum. There, after so many storms, Aeneas loses his father: Anchises dies, and neither Helenus nor Celaeno had warned of this loss. Aeneas says that there ends the last labor and the goal of the long voyages, and that from there a god carried him to Dido's land. Then he falls silent and closes the account.
Analysis
Book III shows Aeneas learning to read signs, and learning badly at first. Apollo's oracle at Delos sends them to seek the ancient mother without saying which, and Anchises' reading, which picks Crete by the path of Teucer, costs a city and a plague before the Penates correct it. The poem separates the divine source, which does not err, from human interpretation, which does, and makes the destiny of Rome move by trial and correction: a Thrace abandoned, a Crete abandoned, and only then Italy. The signs that follow, from Celaeno and Helenus, come ever more concrete, and the omen of the sow is the first that can be verified with the naked eye.
Not every stop is a misreading, and the book makes that plain: the storm that blots out the sky after Crete, and the wind that fails and leaves the fleet adrift until the coast of the Cyclopes, are pure force majeure, and Anchises' death no one foresaw. There is also the measure of hospitality, which organizes the Odyssey and reappears here inverted: Buthrotum welcomes, the Cyclopes devour, and it is a Trojan, himself expelled from home, who welcomes a Greek, Achaemenides. Aeneas avoids Scylla and Charybdis, which the Odyssey makes its hero face, and the chief who chooses the long and safe road answers for the life of a whole people, not for his own glory.
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