The use of ‘machinery’ is a traditional and distinctive feature of epic poetry. The action of the heroic characters are represented as subject to the intervention of gods and controlled by destiny. This interposition may take different forms of varying significance. The immortal figures may remain only the watchers of the scenes from the clouds, or bestir themselves actively upon the earthly stage. At times it seems that the real plot is being enacted in the skies and the mortals are mere pawns with which these divinities play out their game. Thus, we find the gods taking part in the epics of Homer, Milton Virgil, and in the epics of the Hindus, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
In the Aeneid, Virgil evaluates the new conditions under which Romans live. His epic poem enumerates the most worthwhile features of both republican and imperial Rome and treats the two together as if they were a single, intertwined whole. There is no doubt that Virgil had a very wide framework of possibilities in choosing his material for this aspect of his poem. The subject-matter of the poem is in the first instance mythological, and the gods are the standard stuff of myth, as the preface to Livy’s History shows. As in many cultures, the gods had been the subject of philosophic discussion from the earliest times, and this is attested to in literature of the widest range. At one stage or another all the philosophical codes had to define their position with regard to commonly held religious attitudes. This applies primarily to Greek philosophy, but it certainly had implications for Roman thinkers. Closer to Virgil’s own time the gods played an equally important part in philosophical writings, and Cicero’s ‗De Natura Deorum‘ and Lucretius’ ‗De Rerum Natura‘ are manifestations of the Greek-based philosophical tradition about the gods.
Similarly, the gods have a long pedigree in the poetic tradition as well. Greek tragedy, for example with its “deus ex machina” concept, provides a major manifestation of the use of gods in literature.3 In keeping with Virgil’s general conceptual debt to the Iliad and the Odyssey in composing the Aeneid, the Homeric poems provided Virgil with at least a basic starting point for the latter’s construction of the divine machinery. The barest bones of comparison show Virgil’s gods to match Homer’s in being anthropomorphic. But immediately this must be qualified by saying that in Virgil the deities do not intervene in the poem’s action as directly as do Homer’s and one example of this is that in Homer the gods participate in battle whereas this is not so in Virgil.” For one thing, in Book Two Virgil uses no Homeric theomachy. In general Virgil’s gods tend to function at one remove from the main action, but it must be conceded that this assertion borders on oversimplification. For one thing, where Virgil’s gods do intervene it is usually through the agency of a
lesser deity, such as where Jupiter sends Mercury to tell Aeneas to leave Troy in Book Two and when Juno works on Dido and Turnus by means of Furies. In both primary and secondary epic it is possible to distinguish a divine plane of events, a scheme with which events at a human level ultimately coincide. This the epic poems have in common, broadly speaking, with Greek tragedy.
The background to the gods in the Aeneid at the same time must be seen from a Roman perspective. Although not part of the literary canon, the Annales of Ennius represent an earlier Roman attempt to unite Roman subject-matter with a Greek-based divine machinery. Virgil was well aware of this precedent and the opportunities it offered him. Although strictly speaking they fall outside the immediate scope of this paper, mention must be made here of the specifically Roman gods which have nothing to do with the Homeric tradition. Clearly, the “pietas” of the exiled Trojans, as well as that of the Latins and native Italians, for an Augustan audience provide a significant prototype for the religious observance which was so important an aspect of the “Pax Romana”.
Apart from the fact that he brought his father and son from burning Troy, Aeneas’ “pietas” consists centrally in his observance of the Trojan household gods, and this adds another dimension to his reverence towards the Olympians. Vesta and the Penates are entrusted to Aeneas by Hector, and as such they are central to his entire mission in coming to Latium. Again, reference must be made to the Rome of Virgil’s day. As part of his religious reforms Augustus boosted the worship of the household gods, which had itself been an old Roman custom and an integral part of Roman religion.