Between approximately 29 and 19 BC in Rome and southern Italy, the Roman poet Virgil composed the Aeneid, the founding epic of Roman literature, which opens with one of the most celebrated storm scenes in world literature: Aeolus, at Juno's command, releases the winds to scatter the Trojan fleet of Aeneas across the Mediterranean. The poem's opening invocation of wind and storm frames the entire narrative of empire-building as a struggle against elemental and divine forces. Virgil completed the poem shortly before his death in 19 BC, leaving it technically unrevised.

Virgil's storm scene and wind invocations became the canonical template for epic openings across Western literature, directly imitated by Dante, Ariosto, Tasso, Camões, Spenser, and Milton. The phrase 'Aeolus unleashed the winds' echoed through Renaissance and Baroque epic poetry as a standard motif of divine interference and political upheaval. The Aeneid's treatment of wind as an instrument of imperial destiny shaped the metaphorical vocabulary of conquest, exile, and destiny in poetry for two thousand years.