Ripheus (also Rhipeus, Rifeo and Rupheo) was a Trojan hero and the name of a figure from the Aeneid of Virgil.
In his Divine Comedy, Dante placed Ripheus in Heaven, in the sixth sphere of Jupiter,[1] the realm of those who personified justice.
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.
[5] 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 (The Chronicle of Emperor Clarimundo), in which it is reported that Tróia, Portugal was founded by a Trojan called Ripheus (in 16th-century Portuguese Riphane), 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.