Virgil and the Cosmos: Religious and Philosophical Ideas

Introduction Virgil's cosmos comprises gods and humans and nature. These are huge topics. In this chapter I shall analyse the complex relationships between these elements by taking a broad view of Virgil's religious and philosophical ideas. Virgil's gods - especially in the Aeneid - have always been a major focus of attention for scholars. Typical is Camps's chapter (1969), 'The higher powers: Fate and the Gods'. A recent, crucial contribution to the subject is Feeney's The Gods in Epic (1991) which devotes considerable attention to the Aeneid and provides a guide through the massive bibliography on the subject. Feeney's approach constitutes an advance on earlier rationalising or allegorising accounts of Virgil's gods. Instead he insists on the complexities of representation of the gods and explores issues of power in epic as they relate to the characters, human and divine. By contrast, the philosophical flavour of Virgil's views is not explicitly the subject of any single, entire book. Hardie in Virgil's Aeneid: Cosmos and Imperium (1986) says much of significance about cosmology, but critics' analysis of Virgil's ethics is mostly subsumed in discussions of character, for example, in articles arguing for or against the Stoic dimension of Aeneas' conduct.