When Panthus the priest of Apollo appears on the scene, it is said of him—
Sacra manu victosque deos parvumque nepotem
Ipse trahit[578].
A kind of mystic glory from the companionship of these ‘defeated gods,’ for whom he was seeking a new local habitation, invests the adventurous wanderings of Aeneas. The preservation and re-establishment of these gods is the pledge of the revival, under a new form and in a strange land, of the ancient empire of Troy, and of her ultimate triumph over her enemy.
But still more ancient than the belief in local deities indwelling in the sites of cities was the worship of the dead, the belief in their reappearance on earth, and of their continued interest in human affairs. It is in Virgil, a poet of the most enlightened period of antiquity, that we find the clearest indications of the earliest form of this belief and of the ceremonies to which it first gave birth—
Inferimus tepido spumantia cymbia lacte,
Sanguinis et sacri pateras, animamque sepulchro
Condimus, et magna supremum voce ciemus[579].
The doctrine of the continued existence of the dead, the most ancient and the most enduring of all supernatural beliefs, affects Virgil through the strength both of his human affection and of his religious awe. Both of these feelings are wonderfully blended in that passage in which the ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas, and entrusts to him the sacred emblems and gods of the doomed city. How deep on the one hand is the feeling of old affection mingled with awful solemnity which inspires the address of Aeneas to his ancient comrade—
O lux Dardaniae! spes o fidissima Teucrum!