What kind of transformation happens to Aeneas in the Underworld, and how does it happen?
The main way Virgil wants to show Aeneas as transformed is that the future glory of Rome, as Anchises shows it to him, brings him for the first time into full alignment with his destiny. Before he meets Anchises, Aeneas must let go of two of the main obstacles to alignment with destiny. He must accept not only that he has lost Dido but that he has caused her to take her own life and that she can never forgive him. On a deeper level, he has accepted the absence of love between a man and a woman from his life. Then he meets a Trojan warrior named Deiphobus, a son of Priam and so his cousin. In every way, Virgil seems to be suggesting that Deiphobus embodies the fate of Troy. He still bears the disfiguring wounds he received because he married Helen (after the death of Paris). When the Sibyl calls Aeneas away, Deiphobus bids him go on to better fates. Thus Aeneas bids farewell to Troy, and by implication to his own longing to build a city that will imitate Troy rather than a city that wil
