Sympathy with the pure and heroic nature and the untimely death of Camilla introduces Diana to tell her early story and to express pity for her fate. Mars appears only once aiding his own people against the foreign enemy[568]. Mercury and Iris perform the customary part of messengers between heaven and earth. The Italian mythology contributes some of the few beings endowed with human personality which it produced. The creation of Egeria, of the Nymph Marica, and of the goddess Juturna was due to the same sentiment, associated with lakes, rivers, and brooks, which gave birth to the Naiads and River-gods of Greek mythology. Of these Juturna alone, as the sister of the Italian hero of the poem, bears any part in the action; and as appearing in that personal human shape in which Greek imagination embodied its conception of deity, but from which Latin reverence for the most part shrank, she is represented as enjoying that doubtful title to distinction which made the innumerable heroines of the Greek mythology a ‘theme of song to men’—
Extemplo Turni sic est adfata sororem,
Diva deam, stagnis quae fluminibusque sonoris
Praesidet: hunc illi rex aetheris altus honorem
Iuppiter erepta pro virginitate sacravit[569].
Of the other powers of the Italian mythology Faunus is introduced[570] in accordance with the national conception of an undefined invisible agency guiding the conduct of men by means of omens and oracles. And in accordance with the euhemerism which suited the prosaic bent of the Latin mind, the native deities Saturnus, Janus, and Picus appear as a line of kings, who lived and reigned in Latium before assuming their place in the ranks of the gods.
The ordinary modes in which the divine personages of Virgil’s story take part in the action are suggested by incidents in the Homeric poems or Hymns, and, apparently in some instances, by the parts assigned to them in the dramas of Euripides. Thus the office performed by Venus in telling the story of Dido previous to the landing of Aeneas on the shores of Africa, and by Diana in telling the romantic incidents of Camilla’s childhood, may have been suggested by the prologues to the Hippolytus, the Bacchae, and the Alcestis. But other manifestations of supernatural agency, and those not the least impressive, are due to Virgil’s own invention, and are inspired by that sense of awe with which the thought of the invisible world affects his imagination. Juvenal, when contrasting the comfort which enabled Virgil to do justice to his genius with the poverty of the poets of his own time, selects as an instance of his imaginative power the passage in the Seventh Book of the Aeneid which describes the terror inspired by Allecto. And certainly the whole description of the appearance of the Fury on earth, from the time when she enters the palace of Latinus till she disappears among the woods which add to the gloom of the black torrent of Amsanctus, is full of energy. So too is the brief description of Juno completing the work of her agent—one of many passages of which the solemn effect is enhanced by the use of the language of Ennius—
Tum regina deum caelo delapsa morantis
Impulit ipsa manu portas, et cardine verso
Belli ferratos rumpit Saturnia postes[571].