In Book 6, Aeneas descends to the world of the dead guided by the Sibyl of Cumae and sees, in order, the evils of life at the gate of Orcus, the unburied at the riverbank, Dido, Deiphobus, the path that divides between Tartarus and Elysium, his father Anchises, and the parade of future Romans.
To enter, he needs a golden bough consecrated to Proserpina, which she yields to those whom the fates call. In the vestibule dwell Grief, the Diseases, Old Age, Fear, Hunger, and War: the horror of Orcus begins with the evils that already strike the living. At the river, Charon takes only the buried, and the unburied wait a hundred years. Among them is the pilot Palinurus, who asks for passage and receives from the Sibyl the promise of a tomb and of a place bearing his name. Cerberus is subdued with a honey cake and herbs.
In the Fields of Mourning Aeneas finds Dido, swears he left against his will, and she, eyes on the ground, flees into the grove where Sychaeus equals her love. Deiphobus, son of Priam, tells how Helen opened the door to the Greeks. At the fork, the left path leads to Tartarus, where Phlegyas cries out that justice must be learned, and the right to Elysium, where the dead go on fighting, dancing, and singing. There Anchises receives him, and three times the embrace slips away, "like the light winds."
Before the Lethe, Anchises explains that souls pay after death for the stains of the body and, after a thousand years, drink oblivion so as to want to return to a body. Then he shows the Romans who are yet to be born, from Romulus to Augustus, and closes the parade with the young Marcellus. Finally he sends his son out through the gate of ivory, the gate of false dreams, and the poem does not say why.