torical.
As science would not in the end admit any myth which was not avowed
poetry, so it would not admit any piety which was not plain reason and
duty. But man, in his perplexities and pressing needs, has plunged, once
for all, into imaginative courses through which it is our business to
follow him, to see if he may not eventually reach his goal even by
those by-paths and dark circumlocutions.

[Sidenote: The pious AEneas.]

What makes piety an integral part of traditional religions is the fact
that moral realities are represented in the popular mind by poetic
symbols. The awe inspired by principles so abstract and consequences so
remote and general is arrested at their conventional name. We have all
read in boyhood, perhaps with derision, about the pious AEneas. His piety
may have seemed to us nothing but a feminine sensibility, a faculty of
shedding tears on slight provocation. But in truth AEneas's piety, as
Virgil or any Roman would have conceived it, lay less in his feelings
than in his function and vocation. He was bearing the Palladium of his
country to a new land, to found another Troy, so that the blood and
traditions of his ancestors might not perish. His emotions were only the
appropriate expression of his priestly office. The hero might have been
stern and stolid enough on his own martial ground, but since he bore the
old Anchises from the ruins of Ilium he had assumed a sacred mission.
Henceforth a sacerdotal unction and lyric pathos belonged rightfully to
his person. If those embers, so religiously guarded, should by chance
have been extinguished, there could never have been a Vestal fire nor
any Rome. So that all that Virgil and his readers, if they had any
piety, revered in the world had been hazarded in those legendary
adventures. It was not AEneas's own life or private ambition that was at
stake to justify his emotion. His tenderness, like Virgil's own, was
ennobled and made heroic by its magnificent and impersonal object. It
was truly an epic destiny that inspired both poet and hero.

[Sidenote: An ideal background required.]

If we look closer, however, we shall see that mythical and magic
elements were requisite to lend this loftiness to the argument. Had
AEneas not been Venus's son, had no prophetic instinct animated him, had
no Juno been planning the rise of Carthage, how could the future
destinies of this expedition have been imported into it, to lift it
above some piratical or desperate ve