Non Me Tibi Troia Externum Tulit:
Evaluating Aeneas’ Trojanness

Generosa A. Sangco-Jackson (University of Florida)

Aeneas’ long physical journey from Asia Minor to Italy in Book 3 of the Aeneid is paralleled by an equally arduous psychological one.  Aeneas must separate himself from the Trojan community, the small diaspora that remains, and exist outside his own culture as an Other, a displaced person.  For it is through his Otherness—his non-Trojan identity—that Aeneas will be able to integrate himself into the pre-existing Italian community and complete his journey (Syed, Vergil’s Aeneid and the Roman Self: Subject and Nation in Literary Discourse, 2005).  He must be excluded from the Trojan diaspora in order to accept his destiny to found a city in Italy. 

This paper will first examine how Aeneas constructs his own Trojan identity through his expressions of nostalgia for his destroyed home.  Aeneas’ nostalgia does not manifest itself in his lamentable tale alone; it also appears in his every attempt to found a city in the third book (Quint, “Painful Memories: Aeneid 3 and the Problem of the Past,” 1982).  Every city attempted harkens back to Troy, and while all are doomed to fail simply because they are not Rome, the Trojan details of each aborted foundation echo the fall of Troy itself (Quint, 1982; Armstrong, “Crete in the Aeneid: Recurring Trauma and Alternative Fate,” 2002). 

Yet, Aeneas breaks free from his overwhelming desire to re-create Troy by recognizing that most Trojan people and things are associated with the past and with death.  Thus, when he is confronted with the thing he desires most, Helenus and Andromache’s recreation of Troy, Aeneas marvels, yet resigns himself to his Roman future (Otis, Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry, 1964; Bettini, “Ghosts of Exile: Doubles and Nostalgia in Vergil’s Parva Troia (Aeneid 3.294ff),” 1997).  The second portion of this paper examines how Aeneas not only becomes excluded from the other Trojans scattered in the Mediterranean, but also how he comes to accept his exclusion—his status as Other—as the only means to his and his people’s survival.