But still he is an anthropomorphic deity, a purely human conception of a personal god-king; in these lines he smiles on his daughter Venus and kisses her.

This is the reason why Virgil has throughout his poem placed the Fates, or Destiny, in close relation to him, without definitely explaining that relation.

Fate, as it appears in the Aeneid, is the Stoic [Greek: eimarmenae] applied to the idea of Rome and her Empire; that Stoic conception could not take the form of Jupiter, as in Varro's hands, for the god had to be modelled on the Homeric pattern, not on the Stoic.

It is perhaps not going too far to say that the god, as a theological conception, never recovered from this treatment; any chance he ever had of becoming the centre of a real religious system was destroyed by the Aeneid, the _pietas_ of whose hero is indeed nominally due to him, but in reality to the decrees of Fate.[570] While philosophers and poets were thus performing intellectual and imaginative feats with the gods of the State, the strong tendency to superstition, untutored fear of the supernatural, which had always been characteristic of the Italian peoples, so far from losing power, was actually gaining it, and that not only among the lower classes.

As Lucretius mockingly said, even those who think and speak with contempt of the gods will in moments of trouble slay black sheep and sacrifice them to the Manes.