Why does Aeneas go on a journey in the Aeneid?
Yes, he goes to the Underworld to consult the shade of his father, who died a year earlier and was hastily buried, without the usual funeral games. In the meantime, Aeneas and his people have been caught in a storm that blew them to Carthage, and he has been involved with Dido. Now that he’s back where his father died, he belatedly holds the funeral games and then, going on to land on the west coast of Italy for the first time, goes to the Underworld. Although AENEAS’s conscious purpose is to speak with his father, VERGIL seems to have some other purposes in mind as well. If you’ve read any of the Iliad and/or the Odyssey, you’ve probably noticed how much those works influenced the Aeneid, and since Odysseus went to the Underworld, Vergil has to take his hero there, too. Then when Anchises shows Aeneas the glorious future ahead for his descendants, Vergil can do much to fulfill his major purpose in writing, to glorify Rome and Augustus. (He may even be hinting that Augustus is a reinca
