in Greek legend, member of the junior branch of the royal family of Troy: While he was tending his sheep on Mount Ida, the goddess Aphrodite met him and, enamoured of his beauty, bore him Aeneas. For revealing the name of the child's mother, Anchises was killed or struck blind by lightning. In later legend and in Virgil's Aeneid, he was conveyed out of Troy on the shoulders of his son Aeneas, whose descendants founded Rome, and he died in Sicily.