Aeneas’ general situation when he makes his first appearance in The Aeneid is what makes him seem so vulnerable. Juno had petitioned King Aeolus, the king of the winds to sink the ships. “The race I hate is crossing the Tuscan Sea,” she said, “put fury into your winds and make the long ships founder!” Juno bribes him with beautiful nymphs and when he obliges and calls up a storm to wreck the ships all the men know that they are facing death and “extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra”: immediately Aeneas’ limbs are dissolved in a cold chill. This is the point at which he raises him palms to the sky and wishes that he himself had been destroyed in the battlefield. He says that the men who had died there were triply lucky.
I feel that Virgil chose to depict Aeneas in this vulnerable state as soon as Aeneas enters the story because before now we have no real background information on him. I think that Virgil was making Aeneas human by showing his fear and weakness to the reader right off. Aeneas is the son of the goddess Venus, so it would have been very easy for Virgil to simply write him as a hero with no flaws, and no fear, and conquering everything that comes along with a feat of godly strength, but that hero would lack humanity. Since we are introduced to Aeneas in the middle of his life and have not seen him grow into this man we have no idea what kind of person he is, so I think that Virgil was right to show him in this light. Fear and vulnerability doesn’t make a man less of a hero, facing up under adversity is the kind of feat that lets the reader know that the person in the story is the hero.
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