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.
See how Mount Soracte stands white with the deep snow … this is perhaps Horace’s most benign and attractive version of the carpe diem theme, with the stress on wine, warmth and love, rather than the inexorable journey to the grave. See and hear the poem here.
Today’s poem is taken from Schiller’s free German translation of Book 4 of the Aeneid, in which he describes how the Goddess Juno finally takes pity on Dido as she lingers in her death agony after stabbing herself with Aeneas’s sword and sends the rainbow-Goddess Iris to free her spirit from her body. Hear the German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow an English translation here.
Horace has had an unexpected encounter with a wolf: it has run from him although it is a monster and he is unarmed. Horace puts this down to the upright life he leads and the honest love he feels for his mistress, Lalage. Hear the Latin and follow in English here. The lovely wolf photograph is by Gary Kramer of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.
Back home from Troy with Helen, Menelaus reflects. The vision of the reunion at the fall of Troy is by the fifth century BCE Brygos painter. Read the poem by J de S Westbrook here.
In the “Poscimur” ode, Horace addresses his lyre and claims that, together, they have made a new type of Roman poetry by transmuting Greek originals. The lyre is probably not a real one, any more than this lyre bird is: it stands for Horace’s poetic skill and genius. Hear the poem and follow in English translation here.
The great German poet Friedrich von Schiller wrote a thrilling free version of the Books of Virgil’s Aeneid which deal with the fall of Troy and the Story of Dido and Aeneas. This extract from the second – Book 4 – is Dido’s reproof to Aeneas when she discovers he has been planning to leave her. Listen to the German read by Tatjana Pisarski and follow an English translation here.
The illustration shows another famously and justly angry mythical woman – Medea – painted by Evelyn de Morgan.
Palinurus the great navigator and helmsman is betrayed and thrown overboard by the God of Sleep. The Gods have decreed that his life is the price of his companions’ safe onward journey: he will become the archetype, down the ages, of the poor mariner lost at sea. Hear the extract here.
Illustration: Wikipedia Loves Art participant “Opal_Art_Seekers_4“, WLA taft Plate with Palinurus Overboard, CC BY 2.0
