Roman tradition did not leave Aeneas simply a legendary ancestor, it gave him an actual cult. After his death in Italy, Roman sources record that Aeneas was worshipped under the title Jupiter Indiges, "the native Jupiter" or "the deified Jupiter," at a shrine by the river Numicus, treated as evidence that a mortal founder could be elevated to genuine divine status through service to Rome's destiny, a theological move later reused, more famously, for Romulus as the god Quirinus and, under the early empire, for deified emperors themselves.
The Julian family, into which Julius Caesar and later Augustus were born, claimed direct descent from Aeneas through his son Ascanius, also called Iulus, a genealogy that linked the family, and by extension the Roman state once the Julians came to dominate it, to Aeneas's divine mother Venus as well as to Troy's ancient prestige. Augustus actively promoted this genealogy, and Virgil composed the Aeneid substantially in service of it, weaving state ideology, family propaganda and religious myth into a single continuous narrative. Aeneas accordingly functioned in Roman religion less as an independent object of everyday cult, outside his Numicus shrine, than as the mythic hinge connecting Roman civic identity, the ruling Julian dynasty's legitimacy and the deeper claim that Rome's empire was the working out of a divine plan reaching back to Troy's fall.