The wanderings of Aeneas

Aeneas's story continues. After leaving Troy, he and his band of survivors built a fleet at Mount Ida and sailed for the unknown. They went first to Thrace. There, gathering branches for a sacrifice, Aeneas pulled a sapling from a mound and saw it bleed. The voice of a murdered Trojan friend, killed there years before, told him the place was cursed; they reburied the body and sailed on. They went to Delos, the holy island, and consulted Apollo's oracle. The god told them to seek the land their ancestors came from. Anchises took this to mean Crete. They sailed to Crete and began building a city; a plague broke out. The household gods of Troy appeared to Aeneas in a dream and corrected the reading: not Crete, but Italy.

The fleet bore west and was caught by storms and driven to the Strophades, an island of monstrous harpies who fouled their food. The harpy queen Celaeno cursed them: they would not found their city until hunger made them eat their own tables. They sailed on. They passed the coast of mainland Greece, where they met the Trojan princess Andromache — Hector's widow — now married to a fellow Trojan exile and ruling a small replica of Troy in Epirus. The reunion was painful and brief.

They rounded Italy and the Sicilian coast. They passed close to the cave of the Cyclops and were begged for rescue by a Greek who had been left behind by Odysseus's expedition; they took him aboard, then heard the giant Polyphemus crashing through the surf behind them and rowed for their lives. They reached western Sicily. There, before they could continue to Italy, Anchises died. Aeneas buried his father, performed the rites, and the storm that opened Book 1 drove the fleet from Sicily to Carthage — which is where Dido finds him, and where he stops his tale. The queen's heart, by now, is undone.