Aeneas Sees the Souls Waiting to Be Born

She is not what he expected.

The Cumaean Sibyl — prophetess of Apollo, keeper of the cave at Cumae on the Bay of Naples — receives Aeneas with the god already filling her. Apollo speaks through her mouth in bursts, her face changing, her voice changing, her body struggling to contain the divine force. She warns him of wars to come in Latium. She warns him that his greatest enemy will again be Juno. She tells him that his only hope, as always, is the help of a Greek city — which is the most complicated prophecy she could have given a Trojan.

He asks what he has come to ask: descent into the underworld to see his father Anchises, who died before they reached Italy and whose ghost appeared to him in a dream commanding this visit.

She tells him what it requires. The golden bough.

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The golden bough grows on a tree in a sacred forest near the entrance to the underworld. It is sacred to Juno-as-Proserpina, the queen below. It must be given willingly — if the man who reaches for it is truly fated to go down, the bough will come away easily in his hand. If not, no strength can take it. His mother Venus sends two doves to guide him to the tree. The bough comes away in his hand. He understands what this means about his fate.

They descend.

The entrance is at Avernus, a volcanic lake near Cumae whose sulphurous fumes killed birds in flight — the Romans believed, literally, that the lake had no air, that something under the water consumed it. The cave entrance opens. The Sibyl leads. Aeneas follows into the dark.

The underworld of Aeneid VI is not Homer’s grey flat land of bloodless shades. It is organized, geographical, philosophically coherent. The vestibule contains the personifications — Grief, Disease, Age, Fear, War. Beyond Acheron, Charon ferries the dead. The unburied dead wait a hundred years on the near shore before Charon will take them. Aeneas sees sailors from his own fleet who drowned in the storms, and they reach toward him, wanting to cross.

He passes Charon by showing the golden bough. He passes the three-headed dog Cerberus by drugging him with honeyed wine. He enters.

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He finds Dido first.

She is in the Fields of Mourning, where those who died of love wander in myrtle groves. He speaks to her. He tells her he did not know she would die, that he left against his will, that her shadow haunts him. She turns her face away from him. She says nothing. She goes back to her husband Sychaeus, the man she loved before Aeneas, who holds her now in the dark as he could not hold her in Carthage.

Aeneas weeps, Virgil says, for a long time. Then he moves on.

He finds the war-dead — the Trojan heroes in their section, the Greek heroes in their section, separated even in death by the loyalties of a ten-year war. He finds Deiphobus, a Trojan prince, his body still cut apart from the last night of Troy. They speak briefly, exchanging news of the war’s ending, and then the Sibyl urges Aeneas forward: the night passes, and we spend it in weeping.

He sees Tartarus — the place of the damned — and he cannot enter it, because the golden bough is for the innocent. The Sibyl describes what is inside: the Titans, the great mythological criminals, the people who betrayed their cities, the misers, the men who died for forbidden love. The walls are iron. The screaming is constant. There is a triple wall around it.

Then they come to the Elysian Fields.

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Anchises is there, counting.

He is standing in a green valley watching a crowd of souls near a river — the Lethe, the river of forgetting — and counting them as they drink. Aeneas runs to him and tries to embrace him and his arms pass through air three times, as always with the dead.

Anchises shows him what he is counting.

These are Roman souls. They are waiting to drink the Lethe, which will erase their memory of the Elysian Fields and of all previous lives, and then they will be reborn into Roman history. Anchises names them as they wait: Romulus, who will found the city. The kings of Alba Longa. Augustus Caesar, who will extend Roman dominion to the furthest horizon, who will bring back the Golden Age, who — Anchises’s voice rises — has been awaited since the beginning of time.

He names the Fabii and the Scipios and the Gracchi and Marcellus and Pompey and Caesar, and he places each of them in their historical moment, and the cumulative effect is a vision of Roman history as the unfolding of a divine plan so long that it predates the city, predates the Trojan War, predates everything except Jupiter’s original intention that Rome should exist.

Then Anchises delivers the speech that every Roman schoolchild memorized: Remember, Roman, these are your arts: to rule the peoples with authority, to impose the custom of peace, to spare the conquered and to make war upon the proud.

This is not poetry. This is state theology. The Augustan regime made Virgil’s poem the national epic precisely because this passage — this parade of Roman destiny in the mouth of a dead father — is the most comprehensive statement of what Rome believed about itself.

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Aeneas leaves through the Gate of Ivory.

The underworld has two gates: one of horn, through which true shades pass, and one of ivory, through which false dreams exit to the upper world. Virgil sends Aeneas out through the ivory gate. The implications are left for the reader: is the vision of Roman destiny a true vision or a false dream? Is the parade of souls history or hope? Did Anchises show his son the future that will happen, or the future the gods intend, or the future that Virgil’s emperor wants believed?

The gate of ivory does not answer the question. It only makes sure the question is asked.