Anchises

Dardanid prince of the Troad, son of Capys and Themis (or Themiste), cousin of King Priam of Troy through the Dardanid line, one of the last kings of Dardania-on-Ida before the fall of the city (Homer *Iliad* 20.215–240 gives the genealogy back to Zeus through Dardanus, Erichthonius, Tros, and Capys — the Dardanid line parallel to the Priamid line of Ilus, Laomedon, Priam). As a young man on Mount Ida he lay with Aphrodite, who came to him in the form of a mortal princess; she bore him Aeneas, with the stipulation that he keep the secret of her divine parentage, on pain of the thunderbolt (*Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite* 45–291). When he boasted of the affair in wine, Zeus lamed him (Soph. fr. 373 TrGF; Apollod. 3.12.2) — the reason he has to be carried from the burning city on his son's back (Virgil *Aeneid* 2.699–729). He died in quiet harbour at Drepanum in western Sicily in the eighth year of the wanderings (*Aen.* 3.707–715) and was buried on the Sicilian shore; Aeneas returned a year later to celebrate the funeral games that became the mythic aition of the Roman munera (*Aen.* 5.42–103). In the underworld Book 6, Anchises shows Aeneas the parade of unborn Roman heroes and speaks the programmatic 'Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento' (6.851).

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