Anchises

Anchises is presented in Homeric-Hymn and later summaries as a member of the Trojan royal house (son of Capys and Themiste) who while herding cattle on Mount Ida was seduced by the goddess Aphrodite (Venus). From that union Aeneas was born; Aphrodite warned Anchises not to reveal that she was the child's mother. In some accounts, when Anchises broke that injunction Zeus punished him with a thunderbolt, with variant traditions reporting consequences such as blindness or death. Anchises thus functions in the tradition as the mortal progenitor whose liaison with a deity establishes a divinely-connected lineage embodied in Aeneas.

In the Homeric-Hymn summary Anchises while living is described as "having the beauty of an immortal" when found by Aphrodite on Mount Ida, though few specific bodily details are recorded in the supplied sources. In Virgil's Roman epic tradition he is depicted as elderly at the fall of Troy and is famously carried by his son Aeneas out of the burning city; visual-art representations dramatize this rescue but textual descriptions in the provided materials emphasize his aged status rather than precise physical features. After death Anchises appears as a shade among the honored dead in the Elysian Fields when Aeneas visits the underworld; supplied sources note the reunion but give no detailed physiognomy for his shade.

Anchises is a mortal head of a household and an advisory figure: in the Aeneid he serves as leader and counselor to the Trojan refugees and, after his death, provides counsel to his son Aeneas in the underworld. He is a recipient of divine disclosure (Aphrodite foretells Aeneas' future to him) rather than an independent supernatural agent; the tradition records his vulnerability to divine wrath if he violates divine injunctions (the thunderbolt episode). The supplied materials do not ascribe autonomous magical powers to Anchises—his significance lies in his genealogical/progenitorial role and his moral-ancestral authority in epic narrative.