Virgil

The Aeneid defines its hero by a quality Roman religion prized and modern readers often find cold. Pietas is not piety in the devotional sense; it is the correct discharge of obligation to gods, to father, to son and to the community, and Aeneas is called pious most often when he is doing something that costs him. The gods in the poem act constantly and are not in charge. Juno delays and cannot prevent, Jupiter states what is fated rather than deciding it, and the whole machinery serves an outcome none of them authored.

Book six is the part with the largest religious content. Aeneas obtains the golden bough, goes down with the Sibyl of Cumae, passes the unburied dead who must wait a hundred years on the wrong bank, and reaches the fields of the blessed, where his father explains the arrangement: a fiery spirit runs through all things, bodies clog and stain it, and after death the stain must be purged by wind, water or fire, after which most souls are called to the river of forgetting and sent back into bodies again. That is a doctrine of transmigration and purification embedded in the Roman national epic, and it sits oddly with everything else in the poem. Aeneas then leaves through the gate of ivory, which is the gate of false dreams, and Virgil offers no explanation for that at all.

The fourth Eclogue is a short poem written before the Aeneid, announcing that a great order of ages is being born again and that with the birth of a certain boy the iron race will end and a golden one arise across the whole world. In its own setting it is almost certainly about a hoped for child in the politics of the 40s BCE. From the fourth century onward Christians read it as a prophecy of Christ. Constantine argued the case at length in an address to an assembly of bishops, Lactantius used it, and the reading became standard enough that Virgil could be treated as a witness to a revelation he predated by a generation, which is a status no other pagan author achieved.

Two further afterlives follow from it. His text was used as an oracle, opened at random and read for guidance, a practice recorded from antiquity through the Middle Ages. And in medieval Naples a legend grew of Virgil as a magician who protected the city by enchantment, a reputation with no basis in anything he wrote. Dante drew the strands together by making him the guide who can lead the pilgrim through Hell and up Purgatory but not into Paradise, reason going as far as reason can and stopping precisely where it must.