Troy will be made up, eventually, by his glory in Italy. The soul of his wife comforts him with this message, and from here forward Aeneas will always have at least one eye on his foretold destiny in Italy.Apollo spoke to Aeneas, instructing him to go to the land of his ancestors. Anchises took this to mean the island of Crete, where one of the great Trojan ancestors had long ago ruled. Aeneas and his group sailed there and began to build a new city, but a terrible plague soon came over them. The gods of Troy appeared to Aeneas in a dream and explained that his father had been mistaken; Italy, not Crete, is the true land of their ancestors, and thence must they sail. At the beginning of Book III, Aeneas' destiny has already been established: he will found the race that will become the Romans. By the end of Book III, though, Virgil has made the role of Fate more complex, so that his hero's success does not seem a foregone conclusion. The dangers that Aeneas and his crew face are real, even if we know that he will survive them. This paradox is prevalent throughout the Aeneid, in many forms. The gods, for example, know what the fates hold for Aeneas, and yet some of them try to alter his path as if it were possible to cheat the future. In the end, though, Virgil's message is that fate must be obeyed; in fact, the more one tries to delay or avoid fate, the more one suffers. The fleeing Trojans keep looking for the nearest place to settle and make a new life. This is probably what caused Anchises' misinterpretation of Apollo's message, thinking that they were supposed to go to Crete instead of Italy. At every wrong turn that the group makes, they endure another hardship that puts them back on the path to Italy. Juno, seeing an opportunity to keep Aeneas from going to Italy, suggests to Venus that they find a way to get Dido and Aeneas alone together. If they marry, Juno suggests, the Trojans and the Tyreans would be at peace and she and Ven...
