Jack Rackam's video: The First Roman Hero was a Trojan

So Romulus is the traditional founder of Rome, but the Romans traced their history back even further. In the Iliad, Aeneas is a minor character, one of the dozens of princes of Troy, but in Roman mythology he went on to lead his family and a group of survivors to settle in Italy, after stopping by way of Carthage to fall in love with Queen Dido and drive her to suicide when he left to fulfill his destiny. His story was a way to argue the Romans were cut from the same cloth as Classical and Hellenistic Greece even in the centuries when Rome was still a backwater, while also serving as a justification for the conquering of Greece and Carthage, and a way to praise Augustus and celebrate Rome’s future accomplishments.