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42 to vex and thwart liim for many long years. This Æneas—reputed son of the goddess Venus by a mortal husband, Anchises—had played no unimportant part in the defence of Troy. Had we not been told that King Priam had no less than fifty sons, it might have been said that he stood very near the throne. For he was the representative of the younger branch of the house of Dardanus—the family of Assaracus—as Priam was of the elder branch, that of Ilus. A sort of half-mysterious glory is cast round him in the Iliad. He is there addressed as "counsellor of the Trojans;" they honoured him, we are told, "equally with the godlike Hector;" and Neptune is made to utter a prophecy that Jupiter has rejected the house of Priam, but that "Æneas, and his sons, and his sons' sons" should hereafter reign over the Trojans." Some Homeric critics have even fancied that they detected, in some passages of Homer's poem, a jealousy between Æneas and the sons of Priam. But this surely arises from reading Homer by the light of Virgil, and thus anticipating the future turn of events, when, after the death of Hector and the fall of Priam's kingdom, the prince of the house of Assaracus should rebuild the Trojan fortunes on the far-off shores of Italy.