The Metropolitan Museum's painted version of Rosa's Dream of Aeneas (65.118) may have preceded this etching; however, Rosa altered nearly every detail of pose and setting. The artist drew his inspiration from Virgil's Aeneid (8.26–65), in which the weary hero, having finally reached Italy and about to enter into war with Turnus, falls asleep on the bank of the Tiber. The god of the stream appears to him, offering advice and foretelling his future as the founder of the Roman race.

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