Aeneid-Book 3 Summary

Aeneid Book 3

Aeneas continues his story, recounting the aftermath of the fall of Troy. After escaping from Troy, he leads the survivors to the coast of Antandros, where they build a new fleet of ships. They sail first to Thrace, where Aeneas finds a city named after himself called Aeneadae and is preparing to offer sacrifices for his mother Venus. As he makes his sacrifice, he finds a thicket for which he proceeds to pull out green roots for the altar. When he tears at the roots and branches of a tree, dark blood soaks the ground and the bark which horrifies Aeneas. The tree speaks to him, revealing itself to be the spirit of Polydorus, son of Priam. Priam had sent Polydorus to the king of Thrace to be safe from the war, but when Troy fell, the Thracian king sided with the Greeks and killed Polydorus for his gold.

After holding a funeral for Polydorus, Aeneas and the Trojans embark from Thrace with a sense of dread at the Thracian violation of the ethics of hospitality. They sail southward to the holy island of Delos. At Delos, Apollo speaks to Aeneas, instructing him to go to the land of his ancestors. Anchises interprets Apollo’s remark as a reference to the island of Crete, where one of the great Trojan forefathers—Teucer.  Aeneas and his group sail to Crete and began to build a new city called Pergamea after Troy or Pergamum, but a suppurating plague soon strikes and claims many lives as its victims. The household gods of Troy; the Penates appear to Aeneas in a dream and explain that his father is mistaken: the ancestral land to which Apollo referred is not Crete but Italy, the original home of Dardanus, from whom the Trojans take the name Dardanians.

The Trojan refugees take to the sea again. A cover of black storm clouds hinders them causing the helmsman Palinurus to lose his bearings. They land at the Strophades, islands of the Harpies, fierce bird-creatures with feminine faces, hooked claws and a hunger that is…