?
non prius aspicies ubi fessum aetate parentem
liqueris Anchisen, superet coniunxne Creusa
Ascaniusque puer?[889]

During the wanderings narrated in the third book it is Anchises who
leads, and who receives and interprets the divine warnings; he seems to
be the guardian and guide of his son: to that son he is "omnis curae
casusque levamen" (iii. 709), and he is "felix nati pietate" (iii. 480).
He is, in fact, the typical Roman father, who, unlike Homer's Laertes,
maintains his activity and authority to the end of his life, and to whom
even the grown-up son, himself a father, owes reverence and obedience.
As Boissier has pointed out,[890] the death of Anchises is postponed in
the story as long as possible, and it is only after his death that
Aeneas is exposed to a really dangerous temptation; it is immediately
after this event that, as we saw, he loses heart at the first storm, and
then, on landing in Africa, falls a victim for the moment to the queenly
charms of Dido. We may notice that up to this point his _pietas_ has
been a limited one, hardly called upon for exercise beyond the bounds of
family life and duty; when he is himself at the head, not only of the
family, but, so to speak, of the State, it has to take a wider range,
and to be put to a severe test.

To all that has at different times been written about Virgil's treatment
of the Dido legend I must venture here to add another word. Heinze has
shown[891] that no certain origin can be discovered for the form of the
story as Virgil tells it; it may have been Naevius who first took Aeneas
to Sicily, but we do not know whether he or any successor of his
invented the essential point of Virgil's story,--the suicide of Dido as
a consequence of her desertion by Aeneas.[892] In any case the question
arises, why our poet should have deliberately abandoned the current and
popular version, and exposed his hero to such imminent danger of
deserting the path which Jupiter and the Fates had marked out for
him,--of sacrificing his great mission to the passion of a magnificent
woman, and to the prospect of illicit ease and unsanctioned dominion.
Heinze is of opinion that Virgil's motive was here a purely artistic
one; he wanted an opportunity to introduce the pathetic element into his
epic. "There was no lack of models; the latest bloom of Greek poetry had
been in nothing more inventive than in dealing with all the phenomena of
the passion of love,--its agony, shame, an