ere leave self and
passion behind, and are introduced to scenes where the careful
performance of religious and family duties seems to produce ease of mind
and the tranquillity that comes of a soothed conscience. For the first
time in the poem we meet with a characteristic of that best Roman life
which was dear to the heart of Augustus, and with which we may be quite
certain that the poet himself was entirely in sympathy. Strange, indeed,
it is that this should be the case in a book so wholly based for its
externals on Greek poetical traditions; but it is none the less true,
and it is a striking example of Virgil's wonderful genius for
transforming old things with new light and meaning.[895]

It is not only then, or even mainly, the traditional necessity of
describing games in an epic poem, that is the _raison d'etre_ of the
fifth book; the object was rather, as I understand it, to gain the
needful contrast to the stormy passion of the fourth, and a relief for
the mind of the Roman reader before he approached the awful scenery and
experiences of the sixth, while at the same time there could be
indicated--and for a Roman reader more than indicated--the _first
beginning of a change_ in the character of the hero. All this is
effected with wonderful skill by making Aeneas perform with detailed
carefulness the Roman ritual of the _Parentalia_ as it was known to the
Romans of the Augustan age. The _Parentalia_, as I have said
elsewhere,[896] were not days of terror or ill-omen, but rather days on
which the performance of duty was the leading idea in men's minds; that
duty was a pleasant and cheerful one, for the dead were still members of
the family, and there was nothing to fear from them so long as the
living performed their duties towards them under the due regulations of
the _ius divinum_. The ritual indicates the idea of the yearly renewal
of the rite of burial, with the propitiation of the departed which was
necessary for the welfare of the family; and when the liturgical nine
days were over, the living members met together in the _Caristia_, a
kind of love feast of the family, at which all quarrels were to be
forgotten, and from which all guilty members were excluded. In families
of wealth and distinction in Virgil's time the days of mourning might be
followed by _games in honour of the departed_. Thus a Roman would at
once recognise the fact that Aeneas is here presented to us for the
first time as a Roman father of a