The similarities continue throughout the epics. There is a banquet given in honor of Aeneas where he is requested to tell his story of Troy. While Telemachus was the quest of Nestor, the aged king of Pylus, he attended a banquet and was told stories about his father, Odysseus. A serpent also came out the sea in the Odyssey and crushed Odysseus men. In the Aeneid, two serpents came out of the sea and crushed Laocoon and his young sons. Homer's Iliad also gets into the act with the ghost of Hector, Aeneas' cousin.
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He tells the famous story of the Trojan Horse, left outside the city gates when the Greeks were supposedly departed, but actually filled with Greek warriors. The Trojan priest Laocoon warned "I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts." When Laocoon and his young sons were crushed by two enormous serpents that came out of the sea, the Trojans took this as a sign from the gods and brought the horse into the city during their celebration of what they thought was the Greek withdrawal. That night the Greek warriors emerge from the horse and open the gates to their returned comrades. Aeneas is warned by the ghost of his cousin Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors (killed by Achilles in the Iliad), who tells him to flee the city. As this section ends, Aeneas watches helplessly as Pyrrhus kills King Priam's youngest son before his father, and King Priam himself in front of his daughters and wife, Queen Hecuba.
Aeneas returns home to persuade his father to leave the city. He carries the crippled Anchises. Ascamus, his son, holds his hand while his wife Creusa and the servants follow. When Aeneas reaches the refugees' meeting point he finds Creusa has been lost in the confusion. He rushes back into Troy frantically looking for her. Finally he is met by her ghost. The ghost tells him that the mother of the gods (Cybele) has taken her under her care."