Aeneid, Book 6 — The Descent to the Underworld; the Pageant of Heroes

Reading Troy — chapter 44 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 6

Aeneid, Book 6 — The Descent to the Underworld; the Pageant of Heroes (Days after the landing on the Italian coast; Cumae on the bay of Naples; the cave-temple of Apollo; the Cumaean Sibyl's cave; the underworld beneath the lake of Avernus; Elysium)

The fleet lands at Cumae. Aeneas climbs the high temple of Apollo on the cliffs above the bay. The doors of the temple are bronze panels carved by Daedalus, who landed here when he flew from the Cretan labyrinth — Virgil pauses on the artwork, which shows the Minoan tribute of Athenian youths, the Minotaur, Ariadne, Theseus, Daedalus's own escape, his son Icarus's fall (Daedalus could not bear to carve the boy's fall, twice tried, twice failed). Aeneas studies the panels. The Sibyl comes; she is taken by Apollo's possession and prophesies. She speaks of war in Italy, of "a second Achilles, also born of a goddess" who will face him there (Turnus, in Book 12), of the Tiber running with blood, of marriage with a foreign bride. She also tells him that he must descend to the underworld to meet his father, and that the price of the descent is the golden bough — a sacred sprig of golden leaves growing on a particular tree in a particular grove, that breaks off easily to him fated to take it and not at all to him who is not. He must also bury a companion lying unburied on the shore.

Aeneas finds the companion: Misenus, his trumpeter, drowned by Triton for boasting he played better than the god. The Trojans build a pyre on the headland and burn him; Cape Misenum on the bay of Naples will be named for him in Roman tradition. Two doves of Venus lead Aeneas to the tree of the golden bough; he plucks the bough easily; the Sibyl approves.

The descent begins at the cave by the lake of Avernus — Virgil's chosen entrance to the underworld, a real geographic site outside Naples. The Sibyl leads Aeneas. They pass through the antechamber of the underworld where the personified Griefs, Cares, Diseases, Old Age, Fear, Hunger, Want, Death, Toil, War, the Furies, Discord and her viper-snakes for hair all stand against the walls. They reach the bank of the Acheron. Charon refuses passage at first; the Sibyl shows the golden bough; he relents. They cross.

On the far bank Aeneas sees the unburied — souls who cannot cross until their bodies receive rites. Among them is Palinurus, the pilot lost at the end of Book 5, who asks Aeneas's help; the Sibyl promises him a tomb (Cape Palinurus, the etiology). They pass Cerberus by drugging him with honey-cakes. They reach the realm of the prematurely dead — children, the falsely condemned, suicides — and then the Fields of Mourning, where lovers who died of love wander. There Aeneas sees Dido. The encounter is the cycle's most-quoted silence. He calls her name; he weeps; he says he did not know his leaving would cause her death. She turns from him without a single word and walks off into the dark, to the shade of her dead first husband Sychaeus. Aeneas weeps after her. He moves on.

They pass the realm of fallen warriors — Tydeus, Capaneus, Eteocles, Polynices from the Theban wars; the Trojan dead in a great crowd, who weep to see Aeneas living; Deiphobus the husband of Helen, mutilated as he was at the sack, who tells Aeneas the truth about that night and Helen's betrayal of him; the cycle's quietest piece of after-the-fact testimony. They reach the crossroads. To the left lies Tartarus, the prison of the wicked; the Sibyl describes it without entering — the Titans, the Aloidae, Salmoneus, Tityos and his vulture, Ixion on his wheel, Tantalus reaching for fruit, the cycle's catalogue of the eternally punished. To the right lies Elysium.

In Elysium, Aeneas finds his father. Anchises is in the green meadows with the souls of the future, looking over them as a king at a parade. The reunion is one of the cycle's most-quoted scenes — father and son try three times to embrace, three times the shade slips through Aeneas's arms (Dryden translates with affecting restraint). Anchises then delivers the cycle's longest theological speech: the doctrine of the soul's purification and return, the catalogue of future Romans waiting to be born. He shows Aeneas a long parade of unborn Romans — Silvius (Lavinia's posthumous son), the kings of Alba Longa, Romulus the founder of Rome, the Roman conquerors, Brutus the first consul, the Decii and Camilli and Catos, finally Caesar and Augustus himself ("here is the man, here is the one promised so often, Augustus Caesar, son of a god, who shall again establish the golden age in Latium"). Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus's nephew and intended heir, who died young in 23 BCE just before Virgil composed this passage; tradition says Octavia, Augustus's sister, fainted when Virgil first read the passage aloud.

The book closes with the two gates of dreams — the gate of horn (true dreams) and the gate of ivory (false). Aeneas leaves the underworld through the ivory gate; Virgil's choice is one of the cycle's most-debated single ambiguities, since it suggests the vision Aeneas just received was somehow a false dream. He returns to his fleet. The Trojans sail north up the coast toward the Tiber.

Analysis

The cycle's most ambitious single book

Aeneid 6 is, by long consensus, the Aeneid's most ambitious single book and one of the most ambitious in all of European literature. Its scope is total: a descent narrative on the Odyssey 11 model but expanded with cosmic theology, a Platonist doctrine of the soul (drawing on the Phaedrus and the Republic 10 myth of Er), an Orphic-Pythagorean teaching of metempsychosis, a Stoic-Roman political eschatology, a panorama of Roman history wrapped inside a meeting with a dead father, and one of the cycle's most-quoted silences (Dido turning away). Dante's Inferno takes the structural premise of this book and builds an entire universe from it; Milton's Paradise Lost Book II's hell-council and Book III's view of creation both rest on Virgil's foundation. The book is the cycle's deepest theological move.

Daedalus's panels

Virgil opens with one of his most-imitated set-pieces: an ekphrasis (description of a work of visual art within the poem) of Daedalus's bronze temple-doors at Cumae. The doors show the Minoan back-story — Athenian tribute, Pasiphae and the bull, the Labyrinth, Theseus and Ariadne, the escape, and Icarus's fall. The detail that Daedalus could not carve his son's fall — twice tried, twice his hand failed — is one of Virgil's most-quoted small moments. It establishes the book's tone before the descent begins: a meditation on what art can and cannot bear to show. Aeneas, about to descend into the realm of death, studies an artwork made by a man whose son died and who could not represent that death. The set-piece is Virgil at his subtlest.

The Sibyl as guide

The Cumaean Sibyl is Virgil's adoption of an actually-existing Roman cult-figure (the Cumaean Sibyl had a real shrine at Cumae visited by Roman pilgrims). Her possession-prophecy and her descent-guidance are based on standard Greek-Roman katabasis literature (the Odyssey 11 model, the Orphic descent-myths, the Eleusinian mystery initiations). Virgil makes her function specific: she is the guide who knows the route, who handles Charon and Cerberus, who can warn Aeneas not to draw his sword on the shades. The relationship between Aeneas and the Sibyl is the cycle's clearest model for Dante's pairing with Virgil in the Commedia — the wise pagan guide leading the protagonist through realms he cannot navigate alone.

Dido's silence

The Fields of Mourning encounter with Dido is the Aeneid's most-discussed single passage. Aeneas, weeping, names what he did not know — that his leaving would cause her death; he begs her not to run from him; he reaches out. Dido turns from him without a single word, walks off into the dark, and joins her dead first husband Sychaeus, who comforts her. The silence is theological. It is also the cycle's strongest single piece of moral judgement on Aeneas's choice in Aeneid 4. Whatever the rights and wrongs of his obedience to Jupiter, Dido has the last word, and her last word is the absence of one. Dryden's English translates with restraint; the famous lines come through as: "Disdainfully she look'd; then turning round, / But fix'd her eyes unmov'd upon the ground." The cycle's most morally serious silence.

Deiphobus

The Deiphobus encounter is the cycle's quietest piece of after-the-fact testimony. Deiphobus — Helen's third Trojan husband (after Paris and the original Iliad-era marriage), forced upon her after Paris's death in Posthomerica 10 — meets Aeneas in the underworld mutilated as he was at the sack. He tells the real story of the night of the horse from his own bed-chamber: Helen waved a torch from the citadel as a signal to the Greek fleet; she opened her own bedroom door to let Menelaus and Odysseus in; she watched as they mutilated Deiphobus where he slept. The cycle's most ambivalent woman gets her darkest portrayal here. Aeneid 6's Deiphobus-speech is the cycle's structural counterweight to Odyssey 4's Helen-as-charming-hostess; both are true, neither cancels the other, and the cycle's Helen exists in the tension between them.

The pageant of Romans

Anchises's parade of future Romans is the Aeneid's most-quoted political set-piece. It runs from Silvius (Lavinia's posthumous son) through the kings of Alba Longa, to Romulus the founder of Rome, through the Roman conquerors, through Brutus the first consul who killed his own sons for treason, through the Decii (who consecrated their lives in battle), the Camilli, the great generals of the Republic, finally Caesar and Augustus. The speech climaxes with the famous formulation of Roman vocation: "Others will hammer bronze that breathes more softly, others will draw faces from marble; others will plead causes better and trace with the rod the paths of heaven and predict the rising stars; but you, Roman, remember to rule the peoples by your power — these will be your arts — to impose the custom of peace, to spare the conquered and to break the proud" (Aeneid 6.847-853). Dryden's English: "Let others better mold the running mass / Of metals, and inform the breathing brass... / To rule mankind, and make the world obey, / Disposing peace and war thy own majestic way." The lines are the Aeneid's most-quoted formulation of Roman imperial ideology.

Marcellus

The book closes with a deeply personal Augustan moment: Aeneas sees the young Marcellus, Augustus's nephew and intended heir, who died at age nineteen in 23 BCE just before Virgil composed this passage. Anchises identifies him to Aeneas with grief: "Alas, the boy of pity! O if only you might break the harsh fates! You will be Marcellus." The lines are one of Roman literature's most-quoted lamentations of a death close to the imperial family. Suetonius records that when Virgil read this passage aloud to Augustus and Octavia (Marcellus's mother), Octavia fainted at the words "Tu Marcellus eris" and had to be revived. The Aeneid's longest and most public set-piece thus closes on a private grief that was contemporary news for Virgil's audience.

The gate of ivory

The book's closing detail is one of the cycle's most-debated single ambiguities. Virgil names two gates by which the dead and dreams leave the underworld — the gate of horn for true dreams, the gate of ivory for false. Aeneas leaves through the ivory gate. Scholars have argued for two thousand years about what this means. Does Virgil mean the vision was somehow false? Does he mean Aeneas is a living man and therefore "false" relative to the dead? Does he mean the future shown is itself a kind of dream-vision? The question has no settled answer. The detail is one of the Aeneid's most striking pieces of inscribed uncertainty.

Dryden in the underworld

Dryden's English in Book 6 is among the great achievements of English translation. The opening ekphrasis of Daedalus's doors, the Sibyl's possession-speech, the catalogue of the personified Griefs, Charon at the river, the Dido silence, the Anchises reunion, the parade of Romans, the Marcellus lament — every set-piece receives the heroic-couplet treatment, with the formal weight Virgil's Latin invites and earns. The translator is at his most Augustan ground here, and the long pageant of Romans particularly benefits from the heroic couplet's tendency to seal each emperor or general in a self-contained rhyming pair. Modern translations are brisker; for the formal grandeur of Aeneid 6 in English, Dryden remains canonical.

What to watch for

• Book 7 opens the Italian war: the Trojan fleet reaches the Tiber, is welcomed by King Latinus, has the bride Lavinia promised, is then opposed by the war Juno raises through Allecto.
• Book 6's parade of Romans is the Aeneid's main argument for Roman legitimacy; everything from Book 7 forward is the violent founding-cost of what the parade made glorious.
• Dante's Inferno takes Aeneid 6 as its premise; Milton's Paradise Lost Books II-III take its visual vocabulary.
• The cycle's silence of Dido is its strongest moral judgement; hold it against Book 12's silence of Turnus.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Aeneid 6 is the cycle's most explicit single intertextual conversation with Odyssey 11, the Nekyia. The descent structure (a living hero, a goddess-guide, a river crossed, a meeting with a parent, a meeting with the war dead, a return) is Odyssey 11's structure scaled up. Virgil's Aeneas meets his father Anchises in Elysium; Homer's Odysseus meets his mother Anticleia in the antechamber. Virgil's Aeneas tries three times to embrace his father and three times the shade slips through his arms; Odyssey 11.205-209 has Odysseus try the same with his mother and fail the same way (Virgil quotes Homer's grammar precisely). Virgil's Aeneas meets the great Trojan war dead (Deiphobus, the Trojan crowd) and tries to speak to them; Odyssey 11.385-561 has Odysseus meet Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax (the silent Ajax of Posthomerica 5's burial-aftermath) and speak to them. The cycle's two great underworld scenes are placed in deliberate dialogue. The Deiphobus encounter completes the cycle's Helen-narrative: Helen has been the war's nominal cause (Iliad), the cycle's most ambivalent woman (Posthomerica), the silent figure reclaimed by Menelaus at the sack (Posthomerica 13), the charming Spartan hostess of Odyssey 4, and now the betraying wife who signalled the Greek fleet with a torch and opened her bedroom door to her old husband — the cycle's darkest reading of her, delivered by the husband she betrayed. Anchises's reunion with Aeneas reaches back to every cycle scene of son-meeting-father in spirit: Neoptolemus visiting Achilles's tomb at midnight in Posthomerica 8 is the structural pre-echo; the Aeneid 6 reunion is the cycle's only completed father-son meeting after death.

Forward echoes

Book 7 is the immediate sequel: the Italian war begins. The "second Achilles" the Sibyl prophesies is Turnus, who will face Aeneas in Book 12's culminating duel; the prophecies of this book set up the structural rhymes the next six books will work out. The pageant of future Romans is the Aeneid's main political argument and forms the backdrop for everything that follows: the Italian war is being fought not for itself but to produce the line that produces the parade. Marcellus's appearance dates the passage to between 23 and 19 BCE (Marcellus died 23, Virgil died 19, the Aeneid was unfinished at his death). The line "tu Marcellus eris" was Virgil's most-quoted contemporary political moment. Dante's Divine Comedy (c. 1308-1321) takes Aeneid 6 as the foundational text of European underworld-literature: Virgil himself becomes Dante's guide, the descent through nine circles of hell mirrors the descent of Aeneid 6, the meeting with the dead in Purgatorio mirrors the Elysium meeting with Anchises. Milton's Paradise Lost (1667) Books II-III take Virgil's hell-architecture as their model for the council of devils and the view of Earth from outside. The "spare the conquered and break the proud" formulation of Roman vocation will be quoted by every subsequent commentator on Roman imperialism, in praise and in condemnation. The silence of Dido is the cycle's strongest moral judgement and will be answered by the silence of Turnus at the close of Book 12 — Virgil's two great moments of speechlessness in response to violence are placed in structural parallel across the second half of the poem.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

• Aeneas — descends to the underworld; meets Dido in silence, Deiphobus mutilated, Anchises in Elysium; sees the parade of future Romans
• Anchises — receives his son in Elysium; delivers the doctrine of soul-purification; shows the parade of unborn Romans culminating in Augustus
• Sibyl Of Cumae — the Cumaean Sibyl; prophesies the Italian war; guides Aeneas through the underworld
• Dido — the silent shade in the Fields of Mourning; turns from Aeneas without a word; joins Sychaeus

Mentioned / off-stage

• Neoptolemus — Pyrrhus; encountered as a name in the prophesied "second Achilles" formulation; Turnus is foreshadowed
• Paris — long dead; Deiphobus's revelation about the night of the horse exposes the chain that ran from Paris's theft
• Helen — Deiphobus's testimony names her betrayal at the sack; the cycle's most ambivalent woman gets her darkest portrayal
• Hector — long dead; among the Trojan crowd in the underworld
• Priam — long dead; among the Trojan crowd
• Creusa — long dead; her phantom-prophecy of Aeneid 2 is being fulfilled by this descent
• Achilles — long dead; the underworld's parade reaches back to him; the Iliad's most prominent hero is the cycle's structural underworld-resident (Odyssey 11 met him there)

---

This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.