Themes of the poem are the primacy of fate; the suffering of wanderers and the glory of Rome. Motifs of the poem are prophecies and predictions; founding a new city and vengeance. Symbols of the epic are flames; the golden bough; the Gates of War; the Trojan hearth gods; weather etc. The events of the epic narrative are already history to the Roman audience. The many dreams and prophecies of various characters reveal a veiled future to mortals and are the epic's strongest form of foreshadowing. Also, when Turnus kills Pallas, Virgil foreshadows Turnus's own death.
The Aeneid and Iliad stand at adjacent corners of the world's literature. In numerous ways of thought and plot, they are very similar stories. And yet they bear smaller differences from their dissimilar authors. Both aspects of both books are worthy of mention. To start, the two must be compared in the same light. Both tracked the story of a hero from the Trojan War. This hero was strong, brave, and renowned for his might as a soldier. For all this, a goddess near to Jupiter favored them above all the men around them. These goddesses had another motivation, however, for favoring these particular men above all the other valorous soldiers: they were the children of gods and men. They were both the offspring of humanity and deity, and thus demanded the special attention of the gods. For this reason, too, the gods bickered fiercely over the outcome of the war. Their goddess-mothers didn't want them harmed, and often they fragmented the rules of war to save their sons' lives or motivate the troops. Part of this destruction happened in the home of the gods, where the mothers and others would quarrel about whether the hero should succeed at his task. In each case, one goddess would specifically seek the harm of the hero.
All of this would swirl down in a torrent of fate in the lives of the heroes. Their paths would be guided not by normal order, and not by the consequences of their actions, but by the directing of fate.
