Pietas: The Roman Virtue of Duty, Devotion, and Obligation

Pietas pours a libation at a Roman altar with sacred fire, family figures, Roman standards, and ancient Rome in the background.

Pietas was the most Roman of virtues — not piety in the modern sense, but the whole network of obligations a person owed to the gods, to their family, and to the state. Aeneas carried his father out of Troy on his back. That was pietas.