"This book attempts to tell the history of a story, and to show how it is of central importance to western culture because it defines both what 'culture' is and who possesses it," Richard Waswo begins in this impassioned, humane, and compelling reinterpretation of western civilization. The story Waswo refers to is a legend commonly regarded as fact for two millenia: the descent of all European for peoples from emigrant Trojans.

But this study, astonishing in its range and fascinating in its vision, does not merely trace the theme through history. Instead, Waswo examines the way the legend influenced western perception and behavior and became embodied in our literature, religion, law, philosophy, history, science, social theory, and film.

Implicit in this legend of perpetual colonization, Waswo says, is a distinction between "culture," with its settled agricultural and urbanized communities, and the "savage," with its hunting, gathering, and nomadic pastoralism.

Waswo examines the powerful influence of the legend from its first expression in the Aeneid itself to The Faerie Queene to the fiction of Conrad and Forster, and also considers such widely disparate manifestations as the films of John Ford, the defoliation of Vietnam, and the policies of the World Bank.

Both polemical and thought-provoking, the book shows how "legendary images defining our civilization determine our conduct toward other cultures: the fictions are both enacted in history and at the same time used to justify such action morally."