But it is in this very submission to the Divine order that he himself soars into greatness. The figure of the warrior who is so insignificant in the Homeric story of the fight around Troy becomes that of a hero in the horror of its capture. Æneas comes before us the survivor of an immense fall, sad with the sadness of lost home and slaughtered friends, not even suffered to fall amidst the wreck, but driven forth by voices of the Fates to new toils and a distant glory. He may not die; his "moriamur" is answered by the reiterated "Depart" of the gods, the "Heu, fuge!" of the shade of Hector. The vision of the great circle of the gods fighting against Troy drives him forth in despair to a life of exile, and the carelessness of despair is over him as he drifts from land to land. "Sail where you will," he cries to his pilot, "one land is as good as another now Troy is gone." More and more indeed as he wanders he recognizes himself as the agent of a Divine purpose, but all personal joy in life has fled. Like Dante he feels the bitterness of exile, how hard it is to climb another's stairs, how bitter to eat is another's bread. Here and there he meets waifs and strays of the great wreck, fugitives like himself, but who have found a refuge and a new Troy on foreign shores. He greets them, but he may not stay. At last the very gods themselves seem to give him the passionate love of Dido, but again the fatal "Depart" tears him from her arms. The chivalrous love of Pallas casts for a moment its light and glory round his life, but the light and glory sink into gloom again beneath the spear of Turnus. Æneas is left alone with his destiny to the very end, but it is a destiny that has grown into a passion that absorbs the very life of the man. "Italiam magnam Grynæus Apollo, Italiam Lyciæ jussere capessere sortes. Hic amor, hæc patria est!" It is in the hero of the Idylls and not in the hero of the Iliad that we find the key to such a character as this. So far is Vergil from being the mere imitator of Homer that in spite of his close and loving study of the older poem its temper seems to have roused him only to poetic protest. He recoils from the vast personality of Achilleus, from that incarnate "wrath," heedless of divine purposes, measuring itself boldly with the gods, careless as a god of the fate and fortunes of men. In the face of this destroyer the Roman poet sets a founder of cities and peoples, self-forgetful, patient, loyal to a divine aim, calm with a Roman calmness, yet touched as no Roman had hitherto been touched with pity and tenderness for the sorrows of men. The one poem is a song of passion, a mighty triumph of the individual man, a poem of human energy in defiant isolation. The other is an epic of social order, of a divine law manifesting itself in the fortunes of the world, of the bonds which link man to his fellow men, a song of duty, of self-sacrifice, of reverence, of "piety."