As Aeneas’s journey through the underworld continues, the shade of his father, Anchises, shows him the future Emperor Augustus and foretells his glorious conquests as they talk in the Elysian Fields. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Leaving Tartarus behind in his underworld journey, Aeneas arrives at the home of the blessed, the Elysian Fields. He will see many illustrious warriors there: the ones in the illustration are King Leonidas and the Spartans before the battle of Thermopylae, as imagined by Jacques-Louis David.
Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
The Sibyl has shown Aeneas on his underworld journey the citadel of Tartarus: now she tells him of the torments suffered by the guilty souls imprisoned there. Hear the Latin and follow in English here. In the illustration, Virgil conducts Dante on their later journey through the Inferno.
Aeneas in his underworld journey has come to the dread penitentiary of Tartarus. He cannot cross the cursed threshold but the Sibyl, his companion and guide through Hades, explains what he is hearing and seeing. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Having persuaded Charon the ferryman to take him across the river Styx, Aeneas is distressed to find the spirit of his former lover Dido, the Queen of Carthage, in the Fields of Mourning, the home of those who in life have suffered unhappy love. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
On the fringes of Hades Aeneas and the Sibyl skirt the haunts of human cares, false dreams and phantom monsters before coming to the infernal river and Charon, the ferryman of the dead. Hear the Latin and follow in English here.
Aeneas has found the golden bough that will allow him entrance and purged a stain on the purity of his fleet – now he sacrifices to the Gods, summons up his courage and begins the journey.
Aeneas is told by the Cumaean Sybil that the way to the underworld can be opened to him only if he finds a golden bough, sacred to Proserpina, Queen of the underworld, and takes it with him as an offering. The illustration shows the golden bough as imagined by JMW Turner. Hear the Latin and follow the English translation here.
Pantheon Poets’ latest project is an intensive journey through Book 6 of the Aeneid, in which Aeneas visits the underworld. He was not the first: Odysseus had paid a visit in Homer’s epic, and Greek myth was full of gods, demigods and heroes who attempted to visit the land of the dead and return. Nor perhaps does Book 6 have the immediacy of Book 2, the most compelling account in real time that we have in ancient epic of the fall of Troy, or the tragic effect of the failed love affair between Aeneas and Dido in Book 4. It is, however, probably the work on which the exceptional standing of Virgil in the post-ancient world most strongly rests.
The Virgil of Book 6 especially came, as the possessor of a vast creative imagination, to be seen as transcending mundane humanity: someone whose ability to conceive a world so outside human experience, beyond the general run of myth and story, marked them as possessing occult knowledge and power.
This side of him most definitively entered European culture when Dante chose him as his guide through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven in the Divine Comedy, written in 13th century Italy. But it existed already before Dante: there are many references in ancient writers to the use of Virgil’s works as a prophetic medium. Choose a random passage, and it would provide you with an oracle through which to consider the question that was preoccupying you. This practice, known as the sortes Virgilianae, survived long into the modern world, famously, for example, being followed by King Charles the First in 17th century Oxford.
If Virgil’s status as a magician has receded, Book 6’s enduring influence on the European literary imagination has been more durable. Dante, re-imagining the Hadean journey in a Christian age, Milton in his blindness imagining Satan on the throne of Hell, Bunyan in the Pilgrim’s progress, Thomas Gray in the mid-1700s personifying the enemies of human happiness (in his ode on a distant prospect of Eton College), as Virgil did in Book 6, were all stepping in his footsteps. So too were writers as diverse as Tolkien, taking hobbits under the mountain for riddles with Gollum or to dodge Balrogs in the Mines of Moria, and Jules Verne with his travellers to the centre of the Earth.
Enjoy. You can link to the first extract and make the acquaintance of Aeneas’s guide, the Cumaean Sybil (illustrated above), here.