If the poet wished to make a plausible tale of that
period he could no more undertake to modernize his characters than could
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.
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