Tennyson in his _Idylls_. The would-be gods are in the tale not to
reveal Vergil's philosophy--they do not--but to orient the reader in the
atmosphere in which Aeneas had always been conceived as moving. They
perform the same function as the heroic accoutrements and architecture
for a correct description of which Vergil visited ancient temples and
studied Cato.

Had he chosen a contemporary hero or one less blessed with celestial
relatives there is no reason to suppose that he would have employed the
super-human personages at all. If this be true it is as uncritical to
search for the poet's own conception of divinity in these personages as
it would be to infer his taste in furniture from the straw cot which he
chooses to give his hero at Evander's hovel. In the epic of primitive
Rome the claims of art took precedence over personal creed, and so they
would with any true poet; and if any critic were prosaic enough
to object, Vergil might have answered with Livy: Datur haec venia
antiquitati ut miscendo humana divinis primordia urbium augustiora
faciat, and if the inconsistency with his philosophy were stressed he
could refer to Lucretius' proemium. It is clear then that while the
conceptions of destiny and free-will found in the _Aeneid_ are at
variance with Stoic creed at every point, they fit readily into the
Epicurean scheme of things as soon as we grant what any Epicurean poet
would readily have granted that the celestials might be employed as
characters of the drama if in general subordinated to the same laws of
causality and of freedom as were human beings.

What then are we to say of the Stoic coloring of the sixth book? In the
first place, it is not actually Stoic. It is a syncretism of mystical
beliefs, developed by Orphic and Apocalyptic poets and mystics from
Pythagoras and Plato to a group of Hellenistic writers, popularized by