It is this thought of self-mastery which is the key to the Æneid. Filled as he is with a sense of the greatness of Rome, the mood of Vergil seems constantly to be fluctuating between a pathetic consciousness of the toils and self-devotion, the suffering and woe, that run through his national history and the final greatness which they bought. His poem draws both these impressions together in the figure of Æneas. Æneas is the representative of that "piety," that faith in his race and in his destiny, which had drawn the Roman from his little settlement on the hills beside Tiber to a vast empire "beyond the Garamantians and the Indians." All the endurance, the suffering, the patriotism, the self-devotion of generation after generation is incarnate in him. It is by his mouth that in the darkest hours of national trial Roman seems to say to Roman, "O passi graviora, dabit Deus his quoque finem." It is to this "end" that the wanderings of Æneas, like the labours of consul and dictator, inevitably tend, and it is the firm faith in such a close that gives its peculiar character to the pathos of the Æneid. Rome is before us throughout, "per tot discrimina rerum tendimus in Latium." It is not as a mere tale of romance that we follow the wanderings of "the man who first came from Trojan shores to Italy." They are the sacrifice by which the father of the Roman race wrought out the greatness of his people, the toils he endured "dum conderet urbem." "Italiam quæro patriam" is the key-note of the Æneid, but the Quest of Æneas is no self-sought quest of his own. "Italiam non sponte sequor," he pleads as Dido turns from him in the Elysian Fields with eyes of speechless reproach. He is the chosen instrument of a Divine purpose working out its ends alike across his own buffetings from shore to shore or the love-tortures of the Phoenician Queen. The memorable words that Æneas addresses to Dares, "Cede Deo," "bend before a will higher as well as stronger than thine own," are in fact the faith of his own career.