early books).  With this in view he builds his home of the dead out of what Servius calls much sapientia, filling in details here and there even from the legendary lower-world personages so that the reader may meet some familiar faces.  However, the setting is not to be taken literally, for of course neither he nor anyone else actually believed that prenatal spirits bore the attributes and garments of their future existence.  Nor is the poet concerned about the eschatology which had to be assumed for the setting; but his judgments on life, though afforded an opportunity to find expression through the characters of the scene, are not allowed to be circumscribed by them; they are his own deepest convictions.

[Footnote 8:  No one would attempt to infer Stephen Phillips’ eschatology from the setting of his Christ in Hades.]

[Footnote 9:  Vergil indeed was careful to warn the reader (VI, 893) that the portal of unreal dreams refers the imagery of the sixth book to fiction, and Servius reiterates the warning.  On the employment of myths by Epicureans see chapter VIII, above.]

[Footnote 10:  See Heinze, Epische Technik, pp. 82 ff.]

[Footnote 11:  This Vergil indicates repeatedly:  Aen.  V, 737; VI, 718, 806-7, 890-2.]

It has frequently been said that Vergil’s philosophical system is confused and that his judgments on providence are inconsistent, that in fact he seems not to have thought his problems through.  This is of course true so far as it is true of all the students of philosophy of his day.  Indeed we must admit that with the very inadequate psychology of that time no reasonable solution of the then central problem of determinism could be found.  But there is no reason for supposing that the poet did not have a complete mastery of what the best teachers of his day had to offer.

Vergil’s Epicureanism, however, served him chiefly as a working hypothesis for scientific purposes.  With its ethical and religious implications he had not concerned himself; and so it was not permitted in his later days to interfere with a deep respect for the essentials of religion.  Similarly, the profoundest students of science today, men who in all their experiments act implicitly and undeviatingly on the hypotheses of atomism and determinism in the world of research, are usually the last to deny the validity of the basic religious tenets.  In his knowledge of religious rites Vergil reveals an exactness that seems to point to very careful observances in his childhood home.  They have become second nature as it were, and go as deep as the filial devotion which so constantly brings the word pietas to his pen.

But his religion is more than a matter of rites and ceremonies.  It has, to a degree very unusual for a Roman, associated itself with morality and especially with social morality.  The culprits of his Tartarus are not merely the legendary offenders against exacting deities: