Anchises was born into the royal house of Troy, the son of Capys and a descendant of Dardanus, the legendary founder of the city that would one day bear his name. The line of Dardanus ruled the land of the Dardanelles, the narrow strait that separates Europe from Asia, and Anchises grew up as a prince of that ancient blood. But he was not a warrior-king. He was a herdsman who tended his cattle on the slopes of Mount Ida, the forested mountain that rises above the plain of Troy, and it was there that his fate found him.

The goddess Aphrodite, the immortal embodiment of love and desire, had long made sport of the other gods. She had caused Zeus himself to fall in love with mortal women, and Hera, the queen of the gods, and Athena, the goddess of wisdom and war, had suffered her pranks as well. To teach her a lesson, Zeus filled Aphrodite's own heart with an irresistible longing for Anchises, the handsome Trojan herdsman. She came to him on Mount Ida disguised as a mortal maiden, a princess of Phrygia, and when she revealed her true form the next morning, Anchises was struck with terror. She told him they would have a son named Aeneas, a name that means terrible grief, and she warned him never to boast of their union. If any mortal asked, he was to say the boy's mother was a mountain nymph. But Anchises, proud and foolish, could not keep the secret. He boasted that he had lain with the goddess of love herself, and Zeus in his anger hurled a smoking thunderbolt. Aphrodite interceded and diverted the bolt so that it struck at Anchises's feet rather than killing him outright, but the shock left him lame or blind, a broken man who would never walk freely again.

For five years the infant Aeneas was raised by mountain nymphs on the slopes of Ida, hidden from the world. Then Aphrodite brought the boy to his father in Troy, and Anchises accepted him into the royal household. He married a mortal woman, some say Eriopis, and had other children, but Aeneas was always the one upon whom the gods smiled. Anchises grew old in the shadow of his son's destiny, too crippled to fight in the Trojan War but present in the city as the siege ground on for ten long years. He watched from the walls as Hector, the heir to the Trojan throne and the greatest warrior the city possessed, fought and fell. He saw the Greek champion Achilles, the son of the sea-goddess Thetis whose single weak spot was his heel, cut down Trojan after Trojan. And he waited, knowing that an ancient prophecy had foretold that the descendants of Aeneas, not Priam's own line, would one day rule the Trojans.

When the Greeks left the wooden horse outside the walls and the city burned, Anchises at first refused to flee. He was old, he was lame, and he would not abandon the house of his fathers. But the ghost of Hector appeared to Aeneas in a dream and commanded him to save the household gods, the Penates and the Lares, the sacred images that protected the Trojan hearth. Aeneas returned to his house and begged his father to come. Anchises prayed for a sign, and it came: a tongue of flame played about the head of his grandson Ascanius without burning him, and a falling star traced a path across the sky from the palace roof to the mountain of Ida. Convinced at last, Anchises gathered the sacred images to his breast and allowed Aeneas to lift him onto his shoulders. With his son carrying him, his grandson holding his hand, and his wife Creusa following behind, Anchises passed through the burning streets of Troy and out into the night. Creusa was lost in the chaos, her ghost appearing to Aeneas to tell him that he must go on without her, but Anchises survived.

The Trojans built ships at Antandrus and sailed west. They stopped at Thrace, where the ghost of the murdered prince Polydorus warned them away, and at Delos, where the oracle of Apollo sent them onward. They tried to settle on Crete but were driven off by plague. Through every trial, Anchises remained the voice of tradition and memory, the keeper of the old ways who reminded the exiles of who they had been. But he was old and weakened by the journey, and when the fleet reached the western coast of Sicily, at the harbour of Drepanum, his strength finally gave out. He died peacefully and was buried with honours on that Sicilian shore. Aeneas mourned him as no other, for with Anchises died the last living link to the Troy they had lost.

Years later, when Aeneas reached Cumae on the Italian mainland, he begged the Sibyl, the prophetess who spoke for Apollo, to lead him down into the underworld so that he might speak with his father one last time. She guided him through the cavern at the edge of the dark lake, past the ferryman Charon and the three-headed dog Cerberus, into the Elysian Fields where the blessed dead dwell in green meadows beneath a sunless sky. There Anchises waited, his spirit whole and strong again, no longer lame. He embraced his son and then showed him a vision that would sustain the Roman imagination for centuries: a long procession of souls waiting to be born into the world of the living, each one a great Roman yet to come. He named the kings of Alba Longa, the city that Aeneas's son Ascanius would found. He pointed to Romulus and Remus, the twins who would one day build Rome upon the seven hills. And finally he showed Aeneas the figure of Augustus Caesar, the first emperor, under whose rule the world would know peace. Anchises explained the mysteries of the universe, the cycle of death and rebirth, and the meaning of the Roman destiny. When Aeneas emerged from the underworld, he carried his father's vision with him, ready to accept the burden of empire.