An Interview with Aeneas

The Latium Times

Interview with Aeneas

LT: Thank you for agreeing to this interview, Aeneas. It has been thirty years to the day that our former home, Troy, was burned to the ground by the Greeks. Now that there has been time to step back and analyze the entire war, tell us in your own words how the ill-fated war against the Greeks started.

A: It started with the gods. That is the truth in the matter. My mother Venus was in a quarrel with Juno and Minerva as to who was the most beautiful woman of the goddesses. She was chosen by our late Paris, and rewarded him with the most beautiful woman in the world, who happened to be Helen.

LT: Do you blame your mother for causing this war?

A: Absolutely not! Would you ever blame your mother if she was captured by the Dorians? It was Juno’s husband that deserves the blame. He was initially asked to pick who was the most beautiful, but backed out when he realized what fury the “lesser beauties” would deal to him. If I had the luck chance to be able to alter fate, I would have had him choose his wife. After all, when you marry someone, you consider them to be the most beautiful person in your eyes,

LT: So you consider Juno to be more beautiful than Venus?

A: I never said that she was. A goddess of beauty and love is no doubt very beautiful, and had she not already filled the role of my mother, I would vie for her romance to be mine, as many men do doubt do. However, everything is relative to the eyes of the beholder.

LT: Earlier, you mentioned fate. Do you believe that it was simply our fate to lose our beloved homeland?

A: Yes and no.

LT: How so?

A: For fate, it can be summed up by one person. Once Achilles rejoined the battlelines for the Dorians, I knew instantly that it was almost a matter of time before we would fall. How could one army after all beat the almost divine being who was almost invincible? Against fate, however, you could also call that just common knowledge, as even great Hector’s wife prepared for his funeral as he left the wondrous gates of Troy for the last time. Also, it would be better if certain influential people did not know about one’s fate.

LT: For instance, the gods?

A: Exactly. My mother revealed to me that one of the gods had been aiding Hector while he was chased by Achilles. However, once our Great Father revealed that it was Hector’s fate to die, that god left him to die by the hands of Achilles!

LT: I take that to believe that you don’t believe in fate?

A: Correct. It was not predestined that the Greeks happened to take down Troy with a wooden horse. It was not predetermined that great King Priam would see his last son murdered before his eyes, then be killed himself by the brutal murderer. It was not the foreshadowed result that we would settle in Latium, though I do admit that the spirits played a hand in that one. Back on topic, everything happens in the world because they simply happen. They can be altered by the slightest beat of a dove’s wings, or they could not. Nobody told me the exact plans of my life by reading them on a scroll.

LT: But we do have evidence of you contradicting what you just said numerous times, like the spirits you just mentioned.

A: If I said that I didn’t believe that I was to be the leader of the remnants of Troy, nobody would follow me. It is very easy to believe in one’s “oracle” of their life if they don’t question it, and even easier to pull an Oedipus trying to escape it. As for myself, I just used the spirit’s guidance as a motivation to get as far from those Myrmidons as possible. None of us wanted them as neighbors anymore.

LT: How do you feel when someone comes up to you and says that the gods controlled everything?

A: It makes me sick. For one thing, they erroneously group our allies, who include my own mother, with the likes of Juno and Minerva. More importantly, they resign themselves to the fact that this was out of human’s hands. I disagree strongly with this. If everyone does not have the courage to push against the grain of what they have been told all of their lives, then there would be a lot more ambition, and less of this fate talk.

LT: Thank you for taking this time to talk to us today.

A: It’s my pleasure.