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Aeneid · Book VI

The Descent to the Underworld

PassionFate and Free WillDutyEmpire and Colonialism

Chapter summary

Aeneas lands at Cumae and goes to the temple of Apollo and to the Sibyl's cave, the prophetess through whom the god speaks. On the temple doors, Daedalus carved his own story, but grief kept him from finishing the figure of his son, Icarus. Aeneas would have kept looking, and the Sibyl interrupts him: it is time to sacrifice, not to look at pictures. Possessed by the god, she demands prayer. Aeneas asks only for what fate has already promised him, a seat in Latium for the wandering gods of Troy, and that she speak aloud, so that the prophecies do not fly off on the wind like loose leaves. The Sibyl answers in riddles: the perils of the sea are over, but those of the land are worse, there will be war, the Tiber will run with blood, and the cause will be a foreign wife.

Aeneas says he has foreseen all this and asks for what matters to him: to see his father, dead in Sicily, in the world of the dead. He recalls that he carried him on his shoulders through the flames of Troy, and that his own father sent him to the Sibyl, and he cites Orpheus, Pollux, Theseus, and Hercules to show that other living men have gone down. The Sibyl replies that the descent is easy and the return is the labor, and that few have managed it. If he insists, he needs a golden bough consecrated to Proserpina: if the fates call him, the bough will come without effort, and if not, no force will tear it free. Besides, a friend of his lies unburied and contaminates the fleet. It is Misenus, the trumpeter of Hector and then of Aeneas, drowned by Triton out of rivalry, and Aeneas is the first to cut wood for the pyre.

In the forest, he asks that the bough show itself, and two doves sent by his mother, Venus, guide him to the tree where the gold gleams. He seizes it and, eager, breaks it off, though the bough hesitates. After the funeral, he and the Sibyl perform the night sacrifices to the gods of the dead, with Hecate invoked aloud, and the Sibyl, at sunrise, sends the profane away and asks for courage. At the entrance stand the ills of life, Grief, Old Age, Hunger, War, and monstrous forms against which Aeneas draws his sword, until the Sibyl warns him that they are bodiless lives. At the river, Charon takes some and refuses others: the refused are the unburied, who wait a hundred years.

Among them is the pilot Palinurus, whom no god drowned: the helm tore away with him clinging to it, and the people of the coast killed him, taking him for prey. He asks for passage, and the Sibyl refuses, but promises him a tomb and a place bearing his name. Charon refuses to carry a living man, recalling Hercules, Theseus, and Pirithous, until the Sibyl shows the bough. Cerberus falls asleep from a cake of honey and herbs. Aeneas passes the infants who died early, then Minos and the suicides, and reaches the Fields of Mourning, where Dido is. He swears that he left against his will, sent by the gods. She keeps her eyes on the ground and flees into the grove, where Sychaeus matches her love.

Among the warriors, Aeneas recognizes Deiphobus, son of Priam, disfigured, to whom he had raised an empty tomb. Deiphobus tells how, on the last night of Troy, Helen, feigning a Bacchic dance, summoned the Greeks with a torch, took his sword from the head of his bed, and opened the door to Menelaus, hoping it would be a great gift to her lover and would erase the fame of the old evils. The Sibyl hurries the two of them at the fork, with Elysium to the right and Tartarus to the left. Aeneas sees the walls of Tartarus and hears the groans. The Sibyl says that no pure person treads there, but Hecate taught her everything, and she describes Rhadamanthus, the Titans, Salmoneus, Tityus, the Lapiths, and the crimes punished, up to Phlegyas, who cries out to everyone to learn justice. Aeneas fixes the bough at the door of Proserpina and enters Elysium.

In Elysium there is broad light, and the dead wrestle, dance, and sing. Musaeus guides him to Anchises, who was reviewing the souls waiting to be born, and who receives him in tears, certain that his son's piety would have prevailed over the road. Aeneas tries to embrace him, and three times the shade slips away. At Lethe, Anchises explains that after death souls pay for the stains of the body and, after a thousand years, drink forgetfulness so that they want to return. He then shows the future Romans, from Silvius and Romulus to Augustus, who will renew the golden age, and warns against the civil war of Caesar and Pompey. He lays out Rome's mission: others will do the arts better, Rome will rule, will spare the subjected and will bring down the proud. A young man with a sorrowful face, Marcellus, whom the fates will show to the earth and take early, closes the parade, and Anchises asks for flowers. Afterwards he tells him of the wars awaiting him in Latium, and sends them out through the gate of ivory.

Analysis

Virgil makes the underworld do what Homer did not: a place where accounts are settled. In the Hades of the Odyssey the dead are equal and pale shades, while here there are a judge, a sentence, punishment in Tartarus, purification, and reward in Elysium, and Anchises explains that even the good soul must undergo a cleansing before returning. The Sibyl refuses to take Aeneas into Tartarus, and this moral frontier the hero does not cross is the architecture that Christian tradition will inherit, which is why Dante Alighieri chooses Virgil as the guide of the Inferno. The doctrine of purification and return comes from Pythagoreanism and the Myth of Er.

The book distrusts its own rules. The golden bough was meant to come easily to the one whom fate calls and to resist anyone else, but Aeneas breaks it off while it hesitates, and in the end the hero leaves through the gate of ivory, the gate of false dreams. The underworld is also the place where what the official version kept silent is said: Helen betrayed Deiphobus, and Dido, who in Book IV heard Aeneas's reasons, now does not even look at him. Rome's mission, to rule and spare the subjected, shares the same parade with two warnings, the civil war of Caesar and Pompey and the death of Marcellus, and the poem gives Augustus his future with its price stated in verse.

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