as his descendant is represented in the enterprise which is crowned with the victory of Actium[540]. Finally, in the treaty with Latinus, while the secular and imperial power is left with the Italians, the religious predominance is claimed for Aeneas,—
Sacra deosque dabo; socer arma Latinus habeto,
Imperium sollemne socer[541].
The influence of the religious idea of the poem is seen also in the leading characteristic of the hero—‘insignem pietate virum.’ His piety appears in the faith which he has in his mission, and in the trust which he has in divine guidance. Prayer is his first resource in all emergencies; sacrifice and thanksgiving are the accompaniments of all his escapes from danger and difficulty. This characteristic deprives the representation of Aeneas of the interest springing from energetic resource or spontaneous feeling. But as much as the character loses in human interest, it gains in the impression produced [pg 343]of a fitting instrument to carry out the purpose of a Power working secretly for a distant end.
The effect of the same idea is apparent in the way in which the action is furthered by special revelations, visions, prophecies, omens, and the like. These intimations of the future are, for the most part, altogether of an unpoetical and unimaginative character. The omens by which the Fates make their will known, such as the omen of the cakes and of the white sow with her litter, are, like those that occur so often in the pages of Livy, of an essentially prosaic type: not like those in Homer, striking sights or sounds acting on the imagination with the force of divine warning. Occasionally Virgil’s own invention, or perhaps the guidance of some Greek predecessor, suggests signs of a less trivial significance—such as that of the meteor or line of light marking out the way from the burning city to Mount Ida—
Illam, summa super labentem culmina tecti,
Cernimus Idaea claram se condere silva,
Signantemque vias[542];
but for the most part the formal, superstitious, prosaic element in the Roman religion—the same element which made their generals before some decisive battle allow themselves to draw their auguries from the mode in which chickens ate their food,—is present in the religious guidance of the action. The Roman belief in the supernatural was arrested and stunted at a primitive stage of religious development. So far from elevating the thought and enlarging the imagination, that belief tended to repress all speculation, lofty contemplation, and poetry. Even Virgil’s idealising art fails to conceal the triviality of the media through which the invisible Power made its will and purpose manifest.
The mythological machinery of the poem also, although borrowed from the repertory of Homer, yet moves in obedience to this silent, impersonal, uncapricious Power. Juno endea[pg 344]vours to strive against it, till forced to confess her impotence. Venus by her intrigues serves to further its purposes. Yet both these Olympian divinities are but puppets ‘in some unknown Power’s employ,’ which makes for its own end alike through their furtherance and antagonism. The gods who take part in the action are of Greek invention, but the Power which even they are obliged to obey, if not Roman in original conception, is yet essentially Roman in significance.