Pietas

See Pietas (goddess)

Pietas (goddess)

In Roman mythology, Pietas was the goddess of duty to one's state, gods and family and a personification of the Roman virtue of pietas. One of the di indigetes, her main temple was a 2nd century BC one in the Forum Holitorium....

 for the divine personification of this virtue.

Pietas was one of the Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a civilization that grew out of a small agricultural community founded on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 10th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea, it became one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 virtue

Virtue

Virtue is moral excellence. A virtue is a character trait or quality valued as being good.Personal virtues are characteristics valued as promoting individual and collective well-being, and thus good by definition. The opposite of virtue is vice.-Virtues and values:Virtues can be placed into a...

s, along with gravitas

Gravitas

Gravitas is a quality of substance or depth of personality.Gravitas is one of the several virtues that ancient Roman society expected men to possess, along with pietas, dignitas, and iustitia."Gravitas" should not be confused with "gravity" in the sense of importance, although they have a common...

 and dignitas. Pietas is usually translated as "duty" or "devotion," and it simultaneously suggests duty to the gods and duty to family - particularly to the father (which is expanded to duty to the community and duty to the state thanks to the analogy between the family and the state, conventional in the ancient world – see, for example, Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world...

's Crito). Virgil

Virgil

Publius Vergilius Maro was a classical Roman poet, best known for three major works—the Eclogues , the Georgics, and the Aeneid—although several minor poems are also attributed to him.The son of a farmer, Virgil came to be...

's hero Aeneas embodies this virtue, and is particularly emblematic of it in book II of the Aeneid

Aeneid

The Aeneid is a Latin epic poem written by Virgil in the late 1st century BC that tells the legendary story of Aeneas, a Trojan who traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is written in dactylic hexameter...

when he flees burning Troy bearing his father, who carries the household gods, on his back.