This thought of an unseen Power, working by means of omens and miracles on the mind of the hero of the poem, with the distant aim of establishing universal empire in the hands of a people, obedient to divine will and observant of all religious ceremonies, may be said to be the theological or speculative idea of the poem. It is the doctrine of predestination in its hardest form. It is a thought much inferior both in intellectual subtlety and in ethical value to that of the Fate of Greek tragedy in conflict with human will. Yet there is a kind of material force and greatness in Virgil’s conception, and a consistency not with ideal truth but with visible facts. The ideal truth of Sophocles—the idea of final purification and reconcilement of a noble human nature with the divine nature—is not manifest in the world: it is only in harmony with the best hopes and aspirations of men. Virgil’s idea was the shadow of the great fact apparent in his age,—the vast, inevitable, omnipotent, unsympathetic power of the Roman empire.
But there is another personal and humane religious element, not so prominent and not so influential on the action, but pervading the poem like an atmosphere, purifying it, and making it luminous with the light of a higher region. This is the element of religious faith or hope, personal to Virgil and yet catholic in its significance, and in harmony with the convictions of religious men of all times. The rigid, formal, and narrow conceptions of the Roman religion came into collision both with the belief in gods of like passions with men, revealed in the art and poetry of the Greeks, and with the development [pg 345]of ethical feeling and especially of the sentiment of humanity fostered by Greek philosophy. Virgil’s temperament, patriotic, imaginative, and humane, was in accord with all these modes of religious conception. If national destiny and some portions of the destiny of individuals are shaped by an inflexible power—
Desine fata deum flecti sperare precando[543],—
yet the personal agency of Beings, in immediate relation with man, who are not only ‘mindful of the righteous and unrighteous[544],’ but who also ‘pios respectant,’ is devoutly acknowledged—
Di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina, si quid
Usquam iustitia est et mens sibi conscia recti,
Praemia digna ferant[545].
Their relation to man is expressed by the same word, pietas, which expresses man’s relation to them—
Iuppiter omnipotens, si nondum exosus ad unum
Troianos, si quid pietas antiqua labores