Vergil sets the seeds for future animosity between Carthage and Rome in the Aeneid, too - the curse of queen Dido on the descendants of Aeneas of never-ending strife played into then-recent recollections of war in the Roman mind.
Vergil did not create the Trojan legend of Roman origins, but his poem solidified the notion in popular and scholarly sentiment. According to Fitzgerald, who wrote a brief postscript to the poem, Vergil created a Homeric hero set in a Homeric age, purposefully following the Iliad and Odyssey as if they were formula, in the way that many a Hollywood director follows the formulaic pattern of past successful films. Vergil constructs Aeneas, a very minor character in the Iliad, as the princely survivor and pilgrim from Troy, on a journey through the Mediterranean in search of a new home.
The Aeneid, written by Vergil 700 years after Homer, at the commission of Augustus (himself in the process of consolidating his authority over Rome), turns the heroic victory of the much-admired Greeks on its head by postulating a survivor from Troy, Aeneas, who undergoes as journey akin to the Odyssey, even further afield. It makes sense that, at the point of their ascendancy in the world, they would long for an epic history similar to the Homeric legends the Iliad and the Odyssey, written some 500 years after the actual events they depict, tell of the heroism of the Greeks in their battle against Troy (Ilium). Roman society was enamoured of Greek culture - many of the best 'Roman' things were Greek the major gods were derivative of the Greek pantheon philosophy, literature, science, political ideals, architecture - all this was adopted from the Greeks.