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 the later less logical Stoic philosophers like Posidonius, and gaining in Vergil’s day a wide acceptance among those who were growing impatient of the exacting metaphysical processes of thought.  Indeed Vergil contributed something toward foisting these beliefs upon early Christianity, though they were no more essential to it than to Stoicism.

Be that as it may, this mystical setting was here adopted because the poet needed for his own purposes[8] a vision of incorporated souls of Roman heroes, a thing which neither Epicurean nor orthodox Stoic creed could provide.  So he created this mythos as Plato for his own purpose created a vision of Er.[9] The dramatic purpose of the descensus was of course to complete for Aeneas the progressive revelation of his mission, so skilfully developed by careful stages all through the third book,[10] to give the hero his final commands and to inspire him for the final struggle.[11] Then the poet realized that he could at the same time produce a powerful artistic effect upon the reader if he accomplished this by means of a vision of Rome’s great heroes presented in review by Anchises from the mount of revelations, for this was an age in which Rome was growing proud of her history.  But to do this he must have a mythos which assumed that souls lived before their earthly existence.  A Homeric limbo of departed souls did not suffice (though Vergil also availed himself of that in order to recall the friends of the