Ripheus was a Trojan hero and the name of a figure from the Aeneid of Virgil. A comrade of Aeneas, he was a Trojan who was killed defending his city against the Greeks. "Ripheus also fell," Virgil writes, "uniquely the most just of all the Trojans, the most faithful preserver of equity; but the gods decided otherwise". Ripheus's righteousness was not rewarded by the gods.
In his Divine Comedy, Dante placed Ripheus in Heaven, in the sixth sphere of Jupiter, the realm of those who personified justice. Here, he provides an interesting foil to Virgil himself---whom Dante places in the first circle of Hell, with the pagans and the unbaptized---even though Virgil is a major character in the Commedia and for much of it remains Dante's guide through Hell and Purgatory. Although Ripheus would historically have been a pagan, in Dante's work he is portrayed as having been given a vision of Jesus over a thousand years before Christ's first coming, and was thus converted to Christianity in the midst of the Trojan War.
Boccaccio
In Boccaccio's Il Filostrato, Ripheus is named as one of the Trojans taken prisoner by the Greeks.
Chaucer
Il Filostrato served as the basis for Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. In it, Ripheo is mentioned as being unable to prevent Antenor from being taken prisoner. As Rupheo, he appears once, in final rhyming position.
João de Barros, who later became one of the main Portuguese historians of the 16th century, while still a young man of the court of King Manuel, wrote a chivalry romanche called A Chronica do Emperador Clarimundo, in which it is reported that Tróia, Portugal was founded by a Trojan called Ripheus, who escaped the destruction of his city with the group of Aeneas, from which it split, and moved across the Mediterranean and into the Atlantic until reaching the Setúbal Peninsula. There, Ripheus/Riphane's group engaged in a war with a party of Greeks led by Ulysses that established itself in what now is Lisbon, on the opposite side of the Tagus river. This 'transplanted' Greek-Trojan war continued for some generations after the death of this Ripheus. It is unclear if this Ripheus/Riphane is the same as the one of Virgil, and the authors previously referred to, or just a similarly named Trojan countryman of the most famous Ripheus.
