represented as in conflict with resistless destiny, but, cognizant of fate and in perfect union with it, as overruling all lower impulses, divine or human, towards the realization of the appointed end. This Divine Power is Jupiter, whom in the _Aeneid_ he calls by this name as a concession to conventional beliefs, but in the _Georgics_ prefers to leave nameless, symbolised under the title Father. [62] Jupiter is not the Author, but he is the Interpreter and Champion of Destiny (_Fata_), which lies buried in the realm of the unknown, except so far as the father of the gods pleases to reveal it. [63] Deities of sufficient power or resource may defer but cannot prevent its accomplishment. Juno is represented doing this--the idea is of course from Homer. But Jupiter does not desire to change destiny, even if he could, though he feels compassion at its decrees (_e.g._ at the death of Turnus). The power of the Divine fiat to overrule human equity is shown by the death of Turnus who has right, and of Dido who has the lesser wrong, on her side. Thus punishment is severed from desert, and loses its higher meaning; the instinct of justice is lost in the assertion of divine power; and while in details the religion of the _Aeneid_ is often pure and noble, its ultimate conceptions of the relation of the human and divine are certainly no advance on those of Homer. The verdict of one who reads the poem from this point of view will surely be that of Sellar, who denies that it enlightens the human conscience. Every form of the doctrine that might is right, however skilfully veiled, as it is in the _Aeneid_ by a thousand beautiful intermediaries, must be classed among the crude and uncreative theories which mark an only half-reflecting people. But when we pass from the philosophy of religion to the particular manifestation of it as a national worship, we find Virgil at his greatest, and worthy to hold the position he held with later ages as the most authoritative expounder of the Roman ritual and creed. [64] He shared the palm of learning with Varro, and sympathy inclined towards the poet rather than the antiquarian. The _Aeneid_ is literally filled with memorials of the old religion. The glory of Aeneas is to have brought with him the Trojan gods, and through perils of every kind to have guarded his faith in them, and scrupulously preserved their worship. It is not the Trojan race as such that the Romans could look back to with pride as ancestors; they are the _bis capti Phryges_, who are but heaven-sent instruments for consecrating the Latin race to the mission for which it is prepared. "_Occidit_" says Juno, "_occideritque sinas cum nomine Troja:_" [65] and Aeneas states the object of his proposal in these words-- "Sacra deosque dabo; socer arma Latinas habeto." [66]