Summary
Roman, remember by your strength to rule
. . .
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.
(See Important Quotations Explained)
At last, the Trojan fleet arrives on the shores of Italy.
The ships drop anchor off the coast of Cumae, near modern-day Naples.
Following his father’s instructions, Aeneas makes for the Temple
of Apollo, where the Sibyl, a priestess, meets him. She commands
him to make his request. Aeneas prays to Apollo to allow the Trojans
to settle in Latium. The priestess warns him that more trials await
in Italy: fighting on the scale of the Trojan War, a foe of the
caliber of the Greek warrior Achilles, and further interference
from Juno. Aeneas inquires whether the Sibyl can gain him entrance
to Dis, so that he might visit his father’s spirit as directed.
The Sibyl informs him that to enter Dis with any hope of returning,
he must first have a sign. He must find a golden branch in the nearby
forest. She instructs him that if the bough breaks off the tree
easily, it means fate calls Aeneas to the underworld. If Aeneas
is not meant to travel there, the bough will not come off the tree.
Aeneas looks in dismay at the size of the forest, but
after he says a prayer, a pair of doves descends and guides him
to the desired tree, from which he manages to tear the golden branch.
The hero returns to the priestess with the token, and she leads
him to the gate of Dis.
Just inside the gate runs the river Acheron. The ferryman
Charon delivers the spirits of the dead across the river; however,
Aeneas notices that some souls are refused passage and must remain
on the near bank. The Sibyl explains that these are the souls of
dead people whose corpses have not received proper burial. With
great sadness, Aeneas spots Palinurus among the undelivered. Charon
explains to the visitors that no living bodies may cross the river,
but the Sibyl shows him the golden branch. Appeased, Charon ferries
them across. On the other side, Aeneas stands aghast, hearing the
wailing of thousands of suffering souls. The spirits of the recently
deceased line up before Minos for judgment.
Nearby are the Fields of Mourning, where those who died for love wander. There,
Aeneas sees Dido. Surprised and saddened, he speaks to her, with
some regret, claiming that he left her not of his own will. The shade
of the dead queen turns away from him toward the shade of her husband,
Sychaeus, and Aeneas sheds tears of pity.
Aeneas continues to the field of war heroes, where he
sees many casualties of the Trojan War. The Greeks flee at first
sight of him. The Sibyl urges Aeneas onward, and they pass an enormous
fortress. Inside the fortress, Rhadamanthus doles out judgments
upon the most evil of sinners, and terrible tortures are carried
out. Finally, Aeneas and the Sibyl come to the Blessed Groves, where
the good wander about in peace and comfort. At last, Aeneas sees
his father. Anchises greets him warmly and congratulates him on
having made the difficult journey. He gladly answers some of Aeneas’s
many questions, regarding such issues as how the dead are dispersed
in Dis and how good souls can eventually reach the Fields of Gladness. But
with little time at hand, Anchises presses on to the reason for Aeneas’s
journey to the underworld—the explication of his lineage in Italy.
Anchises describes what will become of the Trojan descendants: Romulus
will found Rome, a Caesar will eventually come from the line of
Ascanius, and Rome will reach a Golden Age of rule over the world.
Finally, Aeneas grasps the profound significance of his long journey
to Italy. Anchises accompanies Aeneas out of Dis, and Aeneas returns
to his comrades on the beach. At once, they pull up anchor and move
out along the coast.
Analysis
Aeneas’s journey to the underworld in Book VI is another
of the Aeneid’s most famous passages. In fact,
this passage helped raise Virgil to the status of a Christian prophet
in the Middle Ages. In the fourteenth century, the Italian poet
Dante used it as the foundation for his journey through hell in
the Inferno, even though Virgil’s version of the
afterlife was obviously not a Christian one. Like Virgil, for example,
Dante designed a hell with many sections and in which more severe
punishments are handed down to those with greater sins. Also like
Virgil, Dante exercised his formidable imagination in inventing
penalties for sinners. While Virgil’s Dis is pre-Christian, it represents
an advanced version of classical theology, which was not codified
in the way that modern religions are. In a world of temperamental
gods who demand sacrifice and seem to dispense punishments and rewards
almost arbitrarily, Virgil portrays an afterlife in which people
are judged according to the virtue of their lives on Earth.
This scheme of the afterlife is an idea that Christianity fused
with the Judaic tradition into the Western consciousness centuries
later, but that has its sources in the Orphic mysteries of classical
antiquity. The presence of Orpheus, “priest of Thrace,” in the Blessed
Groves confirms the influence of Orphism, which was also a source
for Plato’s views of the afterlife, on Virgil’s vision of the land
of shades.
