That the _Æneid_ has a controlling idea implies that it is artistically shaped to stricter continuity than appears in the Homeric model. The _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ are everywhere freer. Homer writes a scene for itself; Vergil also for its significance in a progress.[12] Salience is sought by careful subordination. The Carthaginians, for instance, are not elaborated as are the Italian tribes.[13] The slaughter of the last night of Troy is confined to a few vivid scenes. Using Hellenistic versions and evidently studious of their art, Vergil deliberately rejects their decorative detail and sentimental dilation. He reduces the mating of Æneas with Dido to a grave summary,[14] in order to give salience to those other emotions which for the _Æneid_ as a whole were leading. Æneas does, indeed, in the fourth book yield his position as protagonist to the queen who among Vergil’s _personæ_ is the great individual; but even so strong an impulse of creative inspiration does not drive the poet from his main purpose. One of the few great love-stories, the fourth book is still held, as it were by force, to the larger story of mission. The same art deals with the gods. They were for Vergil necessary to epic; they embodied at once the traditional sense of supernatural response in natural forces and Vergil’s own sense of divine guidance. But they rarely interpose, and never interrupt. They work through men; and the course of events is always amply explained by human motive. The foundations of Troy were shaken by divine wrath; but we see them dislocated by human agency. The revengefulness of Juno, the protection of Venus, seem the more plausible because they operate through the passion of Dido. The one yields in the end, and the other prevails, because Æneas realizes his mission. Olympus, now ordered within itself under a calm and absolute ruler, expresses and animates, not interrupts, the progress of human order. Thus Vergil’s gods are more than “epic machinery,” and more than personification. The thoughts of men are not merely expressed conventionally in archaic personal shapes; they are seen at once as determining each decisive action and as inspired by divine purpose. For not only has the _Æneid_ a more consistent theology than the _Iliad_; it is also more religious.