Venulus was an ambassador sent by

Turnus Turnus ( grc, Τυρρηνός, Tyrrhênós) was the legendary King of the Rutuli in Roman history, and the chief antagonist of the hero Aeneas in Virgil's ''Aeneid''. According to the ''Aeneid'', Turnus is the son of Daunus and the nymph V ...

of Ardea to the

Greek hero Hero cults were one of the most distinctive features of ancient Greek religion. In Homeric Greek, "hero" (, ) refers to the mortal offspring of a human and a god. By the historical period, however, the word came to mean specifically a ''dead'' ma ...

Diomedes to request assistance in a war against

Aeneas In Greco-Roman mythology, Aeneas (, ; from ) was a Trojan hero, the son of the Trojan prince Anchises and the Greek goddess Aphrodite (equivalent to the Roman Venus). His father was a first cousin of King Priam of Troy (both being grandsons ...

. He appears as a character in

Vergil Publius Vergilius Maro (; traditional dates 15 October 7021 September 19 BC), usually called Virgil or Vergil ( ) in English, was an ancient Roman poet of the Augustan period. He composed three of the most famous poems in Latin literature: t ...

's ''

Aeneid The ''Aeneid'' ( ; la, Aenē̆is or ) is a Latin epic poem, written by Virgil between 29 and 19 BC, that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who fled the fall of Troy and travelled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of th ...

'' (in Books 8 and 11) and

Ovid Pūblius Ovidius Nāsō (; 20 March 43 BC – 17/18 AD), known in English as Ovid ( ), was a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He was a contemporary of the older Virgil and Horace, with whom he is often ranked as one of the th ...

's ''

Metamorphoses The ''Metamorphoses'' ( la, Metamorphōsēs, from grc, μεταμορφώσεις: "Transformations") is a Latin narrative poem from 8 CE by the Roman poet Ovid. It is considered his ''magnum opus''. The poem chronicles the history of the ...

'' (Book 14); in both

epics The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is a set of software tools and applications used to develop and implement distributed control systems to operate devices such as particle accelerators, telescopes and other large sci ...

, he seems to serve as a proxy or counterpart of the goddess

Venus Venus is the second planet from the Sun. It is sometimes called Earth's "sister" or "twin" planet as it is almost as large and has a similar composition. As an interior planet to Earth, Venus (like Mercury) appears in Earth's sky never f ...

(Paschalis 288, Barchiesi 119), whose name is incorporated in his own. There is no evidence for his existence beyond (or prior to) the ''Aeneid'' and ''Metamorphoses''.

References

* Barchiesi, A. (1999) "Venus' Masterplot: Ovid and the Homeric Hymns," in P. Hardie, A. Barchiesi, and S. Hinds (eds) ''Ovidian Transformations: Essays on Ovid's ''Metamorphoses'' and its Reception'' (Cambridge Philological Society, Supplementary Volume no. 23). 112–26. * Paschalis, M. (1997) ''Virgil's ''Aeneid'': Semantic Relations and Proper Names''. Oxford: Clarendon Press. {{lit-char-stub Characters in the Aeneid Metamorphoses characters