[sarcasm]Italy was already inhabited by the 1st millenium BC!?!?! :smack: Stop the presses. This is an exciting development! 
[/sarcasm]
My first response to “Really Not All that Bright” in this thread was over-abrupt. Let me try again.
Do you have a cite, or other evidence that “any historical accuracy in the Aeneid is coincidental”?. You may be correct here (by coincidence!) but I see no proof for this Pronouncement of Received Truth.
This is what astounded me! Was there anything to suggest that I or anyone thought Aeneas, or the historic Estruscans, came to an uninhabited Italy? 
The only sense I can make of this, is that you misread “founding of Rome” as “initial habitation of Italy”! :dubious:
To find it already inhabited by the Etruscans, I mean. The point being that Virgil clearly thought of the Romans as a people apart from the Etruscans, not as the inheritors of their legacy or anything like that.
Aeneas’ party are supposed to be the progenitors of the Romans, not of the Etruscans and later then Romans.
One point to remember is that the Iliad as we have it only covers a few weeks in what was supposed to have been a 10-year siege, a much shorter story arc that culminates in the death of Achilles. All the other stuff we have read or heard about the Trojan war comes from other sources.
One book that I am reading now suggests that Homer’s genius and intent, in this work, was to transform the epic tradition so that the emphasis was not on the heroic glory of war, but on the pointlessness of it, and the pain and death that result.
The same book suggests that Achilles is more of a folk-legend hero (similar to Hercules) who got imported into the Trojan war story to make that point.
Roddy
Achilles is still alive at the end of the Illiad. The story ends with the funeral of Hector.
Even a cursory reading of the Iliad should confirm to the reader that it is fiction based loosely on tribal myth. The details of the story–when they aren’t obviously in service of the theme, like when Priam visits Achilles–are impossible to verify one way or the other. As for the larger elements, the best we can say is that the Greeks would not compromise on the following “facts” (1) the Greeks laid siege to Troy, (2) the major principals mentioned on both sides–Agamemnon, Patroclus, Hector, Priam–were part of the seige, and (2) Achilles killed Hector. Everything else is plausibly an invention of Homer (perhaps the catalog of ships is semi-real, but this looks so suspiciously like a “shout-out” list that I don’t think it’s possible to draw any historic truth from it).
This is a key point. Homer’s epic is (IMO) clearly a reaction to the commonplaces of epic storytelling, a tradition that (based on the surviving fragments) featured fairly straightforward “good vs. evil” plots, broadly-drawn characters, and a simplified moral ethic. Whether Homer was transforming the epic tradition to emphasize the “pointlessness” of war is difficult to answer, but he was clearly doing something far more sophisticated than rehashing the same old tales.
I was going to say the same thing, since Vergil’s Aeneid was somewhat politically motivated and is basically just a Roman one-upmanship to the Iliad and Odyssey. But according to wiki, Aeneas was already in the Iliad and there was already a myth about him with regards to the founding of Rome. So now I have to wonder…
We’re making progress here! Given what is known about the Eastern Mediterranean of that era, the question is less whether some Anatolian culture established a colony in Italy, but how many times that happened! It could well be that the real migration, if any, associated with the Aeneas myth was unrelated to the presumed migration which led to the Anatolian genetic signature among Tuscan bovines, but to dismiss the possibility ex cathedra seems unfounded.
There are other interesting myths with otherwise-unexplained features that might connect to linguistic or genetic facts. But I think I should look for a more open-minded forum to discuss them.
There is no evidence of any Anatolian peoples settling anywhere in Italy. Presumably some were part of Greek colonies in southern Italy, but there is no known cultural, technological, or social borrowings from Anatolia.
In Greek myth, king Tros is the founder of the Trojan race. From the city of Dardania on Mount Ida he ruled over a region rather unimaginatively named the Troad . His son Ilus later founded the city Ilion on the plain below the mountain, somewhat closer to the Dardanelles, and although he was the eldest he preferred to remain in Ilium and let his brother Assarachus take the throne in Dardania.
The Trojans were initially divided between the two cities. Nevertheless the inhabitants of Mount Ida–still close allies of the Trojans–are called the Dardani in Homer’s epic, implying that some split took place such that Ilion became the only true “Trojan” city, hence “Troy”.
Some comments.
(1) Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. For examples:
(a) Western scholars agree that Sanskrit-speakers from Central Asia migrated to India in 2nd millenium BC with huge effect, yet also agree there is no clear archaeological evidence of such.
(b) More startlingly, recent genetic studies strongly suggest that the dominant Y-chromosome haplogroup in Western Europe arrived as recently as the Copper Age, presumably in close relation to the arrival of Indo-European languages; again there is no clear cultural evidence of any migration.
There certainly are East Mediterranean artifacts of the right era in Italy. It is unfounded to assume that more evidence than this would exist, were an Anatolian elite to have migrated to Italy.
(2) I mentioned specifically only the bovine genetic connection. I am curious why you don’t comment on that.
(3) Prof. Cunliffe considers it “likely” that the Shardana of Sardinia (a way-station for Aeneas) were “natives of coastal Anatolia” who left Anatolia ca 1150 BC.
And, BTW, why is that septimus presents specific facts and conjectures, while Mr. Bandit and others make ex cathedra pronouncements without citations? I wouldn’t object, perhaps, if only those pronouncements were more scientific or more correct.