Summe deum, sancti custos Soractis, Apollo,
Quem primi colimus, cui pineus ardor acervo
Pascitur, et medium freti pietate per ignem
Cultores multa premimus vestigia pruna[590].
The desire to infuse a new power into the religious observance, belief, and life of his countrymen thus appears to have acted as a strong suggestive force to Virgil’s imagination. This is apparent in the importance which he attaches to the offices of Priest or Augur, to the dress, ornaments, or procedure of the chief person taking part in prayer or sacrifice, to the ceremonies accompanying every important action, to the sacred associations attaching to particular places. Amid all the changes of the world, Virgil seems to cling to the traditions of the religious and spiritual life,—as Lucretius holds to the belief in the laws of Nature,—as the surest ground of human trust. He has no thought of superseding old beliefs or practices by any new
Vana superstitio veterumque ignara deorum[591],
but rather strives to reconcile the old faith with the more enlightened convictions and humaner sentiments of men. His religious belief, like his other speculative convictions, was composite and undefined; yet it embraced what was purest and most vital in all the religions of antiquity, and, in its deepest intuitions, it seems to look forward to some aspects of the belief which became dominant in Rome four centuries later.
III.
While the various religious elements in Virgil’s nature find ample scope in the representation of the Aeneid, his apathy in regard to active political life is seen in the tameness of his reproduction of that aspect of human affairs. In the Homeric βουλή and ἀγορά we recognise not only the germs of the future [pg 377]political development of the Greeks, but the germs out of which all free political life unfolds itself. To the form of government exhibited in the Aeneid, the words which Tacitus uses of a mixed constitution might be more justly applied,—‘it is one more easily praised than realised, or if ever it is realised, it is incapable of permanence[592].’ And even if the Virgilian idea could be realised in some happy moment of human affairs, it does not contain within itself the capacity of any further development. The difficulties of the problem of government are solved in Virgil by the picture which he draws of passive and loyal submission on the part of nobles and people to a wise, beneficent, and disinterested ruler and legislator[593]. The idea of the ruler in the Aeneid is the same as that of the ‘Father.’ It is under such a rule, exercised from Rome as its centre, that the unchanging future of the world is anticipated—