This chapter offers a new and original analysis of what I call the Myth of the Goddess and the Herdsman: here the fundamental claim is that the mortal king engaged in a sexual relationship with a powerful female deity (Inana or Ištar in Mesopotamia, Aphrodite or Venus in the Greco-Roman world). As shown here, this relationship is merely the central episode of a longer story-pattern. The myth in full begins with the preparations of the union and the sexual union itself, and continues with the male lover’s transgression and his divine punishment. The punishment leads to lamentation, which in turn paves the way for a conciliatory ending, which is again achieved by divine intervention. Here the sources include Mesopotamian cuneiform texts from the late third millennium BC onwards, a variety of evidence from the wider ancient Near East, and Greek poems on the mythical early rulers of Cyprus and Troy. The last adaptation – the union of the Trojan prince Anchises and the goddess Aphrodite, which produced the future Trojan leader Aeneas – was of special importance in the Greco-Roman world, as it was eventually claimed to be the mythical basis of Augustus’ right to rule as the first Roman emperor.

Human beings become scarcer than before in the simile world of the Aeneid, contributing to a tale about the loneliness and sorrow of human beings who struggle to connect with each other or to affect the world around them. Both Aeneas and the characters in the simile world are marked by solitude and isolation. The human characters in the simile world of the Aeneid share few strong ties with other creatures, and they often fail to affect the world around them in ways that their fellows in Greek epic would take for granted. In the story world, similes highlight moments of furor, the overpowering rage that underlies both love and war and threatens not simply Aeneas’ mission to found Rome but also the existence of a rational world order. Similes draw out isolation and overwhelming passion as two poles of emotion in the poem with little in between. They use new storytelling techniques that appear rarely or not at all in the similes of earlier epics, and they often lack an exit expression joining a simile to the story. These features weaken the conventional distinctions between similes and other components of epic narrative.

The figures of Dido and Aeneas in Aeneid 4 illustrate how Virgil adopts Stoic belief in human responsibility. Dido’s naturally determined disposition to fall in love with Aeneas is indeed Homerically co-motivated with Venus and Juno (who can be viewed as Stoic ‘impressions’), but she allows it to resist ‘incognitively’ what she knows from Aeneas and the prophets is fate, Aeneas’ duty to ‘follow Italy’. She is ‘dragged’ by fate through her own noble disposition when she realises her wrongdoing and wishes for her death. Otherwise, her career and her curses on Rome illustrate perfectly the Stoic chain of fate’s causality. Aeneas, despite his growing knowledge of his fate and his natural disposition to fulfil it, at first rejects it because of his Stoically ‘incognitive’ loneliness. In his speech to Dido, he reveals that his assent to fate is still shaky when he states that he is not following Italy ‘of my own will’. The oak simile captures his situation: ‘his mind remains unmoved, tears roll to no purpose.’ But after Mercury urges him to perform his duty to fate, he obeys, ‘rejoicing’ , finally giving his assent to fate, but remaining very much a Stoic ‘moral progressor’.

The central chapters of this book focus on the development and growth of insular origin legends over time by studying a key subset of themes that came to take on particular significance within this corpus. Tracing the expansion and increasing centrality of these themes over time allows us to witness the influence that individual texts within the corpus of material containing early insular origin legends had on the development of these legends themselves. Chapter Two focuses on exile, first tracing the influence of the biblical myth of Exodus and the classical legend of the Aeneid on early medieval authors before examining contemporary evidence for exile in early medieval legal and historical texts. The chapter argues that as the corpus of insular works containing origin narratives grew and developed over time, the concept of exile took on central importance. Arising from Gildas’s foundational description of Britain as an island on the outermost fringes of the known world, the centrality of exile to insular origin stories grew after the ninth-century Historia Brittonum introduced the influential legend that Britain’s founding ancestor was Brutus, an exile from Troy. From there, the concept of exile gained increasing thematic importance within insular origin narratives.

The myth of Trojan origins of the Romans was given new life in the middle of the first century BCE, with the rise to power of Caesar and Augustus. There was more than one way to negotiate the relationship between Greece and Rome that the myth implied. One way was to continue privileging Romulus and the old foundational legend by marginalizing the myth of Trojan origins along with the antagonism between Greece and Rome that it implied (Horace). Another way was to neutralize the antagonism by claiming that the Trojans were in fact of Greek descent ( Dionysius of Halicarnassus). But it was also possible, rather than avoiding the antagonism, to bring it to the fore by presenting the Trojans and, by implication, the Romans as superior to the Greeks (Vergil). Vergil’s solution suited best the new geopolitical reality and the imperial ambitions of Rome. This transpires not only from the Aeneid but also from those imperial Greek authors who recognized that the traditional narrative of the Trojan War did not suit any longer the world in which they lived. The revised Trojan myth they promulgated brought about a thorough revision of the Trojan tradition, which survived into the early modern period.

The myth of Trojan origins of the Romans was given new life in the middle of the first century BCE, with the rise to power of Caesar and Augustus. There was more than one way to negotiate the relationship between Greece and Rome that the myth implied. One way was to continue privileging Romulus and the old foundational legend by marginalizing the myth of Trojan origins along with the antagonism between Greece and Rome that it implied (Horace). Another way was to neutralize the antagonism by claiming that the Trojans were in fact of Greek descent ( Dionysius of Halicarnassus). But it was also possible, rather than avoiding the antagonism, to bring it to the fore by presenting the Trojans and, by implication, the Romans as superior to the Greeks (Vergil). Vergil’s solution suited best the new geopolitical reality and the imperial ambitions of Rome. This transpires not only from the Aeneid but also from those imperial Greek authors who recognized that the traditional narrative of the Trojan War did not suit any longer the world in which they lived. The revised Trojan myth they promulgated brought about a thorough revision of the Trojan tradition, which survived into the early modern period.

When Mercury in Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid appears to Aeneas and tells him to leave Dido he is not simply a representation of Aeneas’ inner thought processes. He stands for a world-historical vision that is communicated via Mercury from Jupiter. The chapter analyses the divine intermediaries in Homer and Apollonius as well as Virgil.

The prophecy of future Roman greatness that Aeneas hears from his father Anchises in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid is not mere triumphalism, but shows the strong influence both of Plato’s apocalyptic myths in the Republic and of Cicero’s adaptations of Plato in his Somnium Scipionis. The vision of future Roman history is severely qualified when viewed through the perspective of philosophical scepticism about human glory and worldly achievement.

The depiction of Troy and Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid is influenced by the very recent events of the civil war between the future Augustus and Mark Antony and Cleopatra. The orientalising propaganda directed against Cleopatra and her city of Alexandria has left its mark on the depiction of Carthage and Dido, whose temptations for Aeneas recall the temptations of Alexandria and Cleopatra for Mark Antony. The victory at Actium over Antony and Cleopatra represents the defeat of a threat of a Roman reversion to their Eastern origins in Troy.

An analysis of Aeneas’ departure from Dido in Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid, discussing his speech of defence in particular, together with an investigation of the poem’s overall attitude to the use of rhetorical language