the hatred of Zeus, and predicts that AEneas and his descendants
shall reign over the Trojans: the race of Dardanus, beloved by Zeus more
than all his other sons, would thus be preserved, since AEneas belonged
to it. Accordingly, when AEneas is in imminent peril from the hands of
Achilles, Poseidon specially interferes to rescue him, and even the
implacable miso-Trojan goddess Here assents to the proceeding. These
passages have been construed by various able critics to refer to a
family of philo-Hellenic or semi-Hellenic AEneadae, known even in the time
of the early singers of the _Iliad_ as masters of some territory in or
near the Troad, and professing to be descended from, as well as
worshipping, AEneas. In the town of Scepsis, situated in the mountainous
range of Ida, about thirty miles eastward of Ilium, there existed two
noble and priestly families who professed to be descended, the one from
Hector, the other from AEneas. The Scepsian critic Demetrius (in whose
time both these families were still to be found) informs us that
Scamandrius, son of Hector, and Ascanius, son of AEneas, were the
_archegets_ or heroic founders of his native city, which had been
originally situated on one of the highest ranges of Ida, and was
subsequently transferred by them to the less lofty spot on which it
stood in his time. In Arisbe and Gentinus there seem to have been
families professing the same descent, since the same _archegets_ were
acknowledged. In Ophrynium, Hector had his consecrated edifice, while in
Ilium both he and AEneas were worshipped as gods: and it was the
remarkable statement of the Lesbian Menecrates that AEneas, "having been
wronged by Paris and stripped of the sacred privileges which belonged to
him, avenged himself by betraying the city, and then became one of the
Greeks."

One tale thus among many respecting AEneas, and that, too, the most
ancient of all, preserved among natives of the Troad, who worshipped him
as their heroic ancestor, was that after the capture of Troy he
continued in the country as king of the remaining Trojans, on friendly
terms with the Greeks. But there were other tales respecting him, alike
numerous and irreconcilable: the hand of destiny marked him as a
wanderer (_fato profugus_) and his ubiquity is not exceeded even by that
of Odysseus. We hear of him at AEnus in Thrace, in Pallene, at AEneia in
the Thermaic Gulf, in Delos, at Orchomenus and Mantineia in Arcadia, in
the islands of Cyth