Tom Holland

Athena even put her on Hera's breast when Hera was asleep because it would bond them if he suckled her milk.

But she woke and saw it and tossed him away and her breast milk spread across the sky to form the Milky Way.

They are.

So they are, as you say, refugees from the sack of Troy by the Greeks.

And the man speaking the lines that you read so powerfully is their leader, a prince called Aeneas, who is the son of Venus, the goddess of love and beauty.

And Aeneas in that passage is describing what it had been like to live through the destruction of Troy, to watch its topless towers consumed by fire.

And he is giving this account at a great feast that has been held in his honour by Dido,

because she has fallen in love with Aeneas and we talked about this in the very first episode that we did on Carthage I mean about 400 years ago actually I think it was episode 421 and people who listen to that may remember what happens next after this feast because Aeneas and Dido go out hunting there's a storm they take shelter in a cave and while they're in the cave the earth moves and

And Dido, although not Aeneas, assumes from this point on that they are now man and wife.

The problem for Dido is that Aeneas has this destiny that has been plotted out for him by the gods, and specifically by Jupiter, the king of the gods.

And this destiny is that Aeneas has to sail to Italy and found a town there that in due course will result in the founding of Rome.

And so Jupiter sends Mercury, the messenger of the gods, down to Aeneas and says, you know, stop hanging around with this Carthaginian woman.

Get on, go and found Rome.

And Aeneas is very obedient to the will of the gods.

And so he dumps Dido and he sails away from Carthage for Italy.

And Dido is so distraught at being portrayed like this that she stabs herself to death with Aeneas' sword.

But not before she has called for her descendants to nurture an undying hatred for the descendants of Aeneas.

Well, I mean, every Roman reading the Aeneid when it came out in the age of Augustus knew exactly who was meant.

It was Hannibal, Hannibal Barker.

That great military genius whose career we've been describing in our previous episodes, who for almost two decades had indeed fought the Romans with fire and iron.