In the Underworld section, the shedding of various parts of Aeneas' identity was covered. However, his identity losses began much earlier than the Underworld and continue on beyond it. It was simply the most concentrated occasion.

The first loss occured, of course, in Troy with the death of Creusa. Although Aeneas carelessly loses her, her loss still resonates and drives him back into the flaming city three times to seek her. However, if he is to fufill his destiny, he can not be married. He must marry a Latin princess with no personality. So Creusa has to go and a small part of Aeneas goes with her. His first, true love, the mother of his child is gone. In addition, his homeland is gone. Aeneas is now a rootless wanderer with his greatest helpmate ripped from him.

The, later on, he must give up all pretense at being able to choose his love where he himself might want to find it. This is the moral of his episode with Dido, for she is not the love the gods will allow him to have. For a more in depth discussion, go to the Abandoning Dido section. Suffice it to say, Aeneas is once again impressed with the order that he can not choose how he will live. And he blindly accepts this.

Another episode worth mentioning is the episode with the Trojan women. Inspired to madness by Juno, they burn some of the Trojan ships when they are ashore at Sicily. The women are weary of sailing, and so Aeneas leaves them behind. With the removal of Trojan females(although one or two seem to stay along for the ride) the possibility of continuing the Trojan race is impossible. Aeneas, being a moron, does not seem to care about this. Now all he holds of Troy is the penates, or his household gods.

Throughout the whole epic, Aeneas has been shown again and again that he must abandon any hope of recreating Troy. He is not allowed to stay with Andromache and Helenus in their "New Pergamus" or to remain behind under the rule of pseudo-Trojan Acestes. He must give up his goal of rebuilding Troy in his new city and look to Rome. When Aeneas loses his father, he also loses a large part of his identity. Anchises was a great seer and interpreter and with his death, Aeneas lost a source of strength. (But he does not even completely give up his role as son until he meets Anchises again in the Underworld.) Now he must seek his own way. And as we have seen, he makes a poor job of it most of the time.

When Aeneas finally lands in Italy, he sends an embassy to Latinus, king of Latium. The king grants the Trojans peace and seeks to engage his daughter Lavinia to Aeneas. However, as was said, Aeneas left behind the part of himself that is a supplicant in the Underworld. His attempts to act as a supplicant are now useless, as Juno sends a fury to goad Latinus' wife, Amata, to stir the rage of Turnus, Lavinia's suitor. He declares war on the Trojans. Even with this clear warning that the way of the supplicant is no longer for him, Aeneas goes to Evander seeking an ally. Evander graciously agrees and gives Aeneas troops. Most importantly, he sends his son Pallas with Aeneas. Now, personally, I wouldn't have trusted Aeneas with my dog, let alone my son, but Evander obviously trusts him. And for his trust, his son is brutally killed. Evander even suspected that this would happen, and still he sent his son. Perhaps Aeneas is not the only stupid man in the Aeneid.

As for the battle itself, Aeneas enjoys it to a degree we have not seen him enjoy war before. Where he once spared even Helen, the most hated enemy of the Trojans, he now can not even spare a son fighting to defend his father. And he gloats at his victories in a way that we have not seen him do before. The key to this new behavior from Aeneas is that he has given up. He has fully accepted the fate which the gods have foisted upon him and is now fighting not as a person but as the founder of the Roman line. No more is Aeneas a person, but simply a tool. His lust for battle can be seen as a way of taking out his anger at this subversion or simply an extension of the loss of his humanity.

Perhaps the last time we see Aeneas as human is when he mourns the death of Pallas. Here he finally realises that he can no longer plead for help, but must take it by force. Another interpretation, and admittedly a far-fetched one, is that he and Pallas were romantically involved or at least that Aeneas had more than friendly feelings for the youth. His words at the funeral might seem to support this theory, when he speaks of his love for Pallas. Indeed, he even gives him as a shroud clothes made for him by Dido. At the same time as the funeral, he allows the Latins to collect their dead from the battlefield. Here is the old Aeneas we know, a brief glimpse of him before the final perversion.

The final lines of the Aeneid, the final impression of Aeneas that we get is so far removed from the Aeneas that we meet at the beginning that it is nigh impossible to recognize. Gone is the compassionate father, gone is the lover, gone is the son. Gone even is the Trojan, for Juno and Jupiter strike a deal that Aeneas and the Trojans will be assimilated into the Latins, with not a trace of their heritage left. With this last stripped from him, Aeneas has lost everything that makes him the person he is, and he is left simply with his rage, with his weapons. He has become Achilles. The beginning of the Aeneid, "I sing of arms and the man.." should have clued us into this at the beginning. Arms are what are important, not the man who wields them.

"Vergil, I think, has caught a truth in this representation of angry, murderous Aeneas. Killing Turnus is a victory for the cause, but not for Aeneas. In this final struggle... Aeneas can only be the loser. Triumphant he should never be; angry, I feel that I understand him better. It is his final assertion against (enslavement to?) the destiny that has almost dehumanized him, the final proof by Vergil that "pius Aeneas" (pious Aeneas) is not passive, but more tragic than Dido and Turnus together." (William S. Anderson, The Art of the Aeneid, 1969)

When Aeneas kills Turnus, he gives up his identity for good. Although it might have been possible for such a skilled poet as Virgil to restore it to him if he had finished the Aeneid, we must work with what we have of the poem. And in that, we have Aeneas killing a man who has begged for mercy. Much as Achilles denies Hector's pleas when he sees him wearing patroclus' borrowed armor, Aeneas savagely kills Turnus when he sees him wearing Pallas' sword belt. This is the same man who has not killed Greeks(in the person of Achaemenides), who has spared the life of Helen, the most hated enemy of his race. Now, he kills Turnus, with whom he has no such hatred other than that of enemies in war. I personally can not stand by and idly watch Aeneas kill his own identity when he kills Turnus. I am outraged. I am disgusted with what he has allowed himself to become, that he has not struggled to keep his identity.

The reason Aeneas is such a bad man is because he is not allowed to be a man. He must be "the founder of the Roman race". And therefore, he can not keep the redeeming characteristics he has at the beginning of the poem . One by one, they are taken from him, until he can only fight and kill.

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