Anchises

/ ˌænˈkaɪsiːz /

noun

1. classical myth a Trojan prince and father of Aeneas. In the Aeneid, he is rescued by his son at the fall of Troy and dies in Sicily

Example Sentences

One of the spirits that Aeneas meets is his father, Anchises, whom he’d carried on his back as they fled Troy, and who has since died; as Anchises guides his son through the murky landscape, he draws his attention to a fabulous parade of monarchs, warriors, statesmen, and heroes who will distinguish the history of the future Roman state, from the mythic king Romulus to Augustus himself.

Read more on The New Yorker

That’s pretty much a direct quote of lines spoken in the “Aeneid” by the ghost of Aeneas’s father, Anchises, who he sees in the underworld, and who basically says to him: “Other people will make sculpture. Your art, your job as a Roman, is to ‘spare defeated peoples, tame the proud.’”

Read more on New York Times

Heaney deftly highlights the dramatic tension of the opening passages, where the warrior Aeneas travels to the cave of the Sibyl to beseech her for one face-to-face meeting in the underworld with his dead father, Anchises.

Read more on Washington Post

And in the poem’s conclusion, Heaney noted in a preface, “the translator is likely to have moved from inspiration to grim determination,” as Virgil, through Anchises, offers up for admiration a catalogue of the names of great Roman generals to come once Aeneas has gone on to found Rome.

Read more on Economist

Its themes haunted him: the miraculous wresting away of the golden bough; Charon’s lugubrious barge; Aeneas’s quest to meet the shade of his talkative father, Anchises, by descending into the underworld.

Read more on Economist