Aeneas's Journey to the Underworld

At a Glance

• Central figures: Aeneas, Trojan prince and son of Venus; the Sibyl of Cumae, Apollo’s prophetess; Anchises, Aeneas’s dead father; Charon, ferryman of the dead; and the shade of Dido, former queen of Carthage.
• Setting: Cumae on the coast of Campania and the realm beneath the earth, as told in Book VI of Virgil’s Aeneid.
• The turn: Aeneas, carrying a golden bough torn from a sacred tree, persuades the Sibyl to guide him through the gates of the underworld so he may speak with Anchises.
• The outcome: Anchises shows Aeneas a procession of souls waiting to be born - the future kings and heroes of Rome - and Aeneas returns through the ivory gate of false dreams, carrying the knowledge of what his suffering is for.
• The legacy: The katabasis - the living man’s descent among the dead - became the foundational act of Roman destiny, binding Aeneas’s personal grief to the city that would one day rule the world.

Anchises died at Drepanum, in Sicily, and Aeneas buried him there. A year later, driven by storms across the Tyrrhenian Sea, Aeneas brought his ships to shore at Cumae. He had not come for rest. He had come because his father’s ghost had appeared to him in a dream and told him to seek the Sibyl, and through her to find a way down to the land of the dead.

The Sibyl’s cave was cut into the rock of the headland - a hundred passages, a hundred mouths, and through all of them the voice of the prophetess echoed when Apollo filled her. Aeneas climbed to the temple of Apollo above the cave, its doors carved with Daedalus’s flight from Crete, and there he prayed. He asked the god for what had been promised: a home in Latium, a city, an end to wandering. Then the Sibyl came out to him, shaking, her face changed, and she told him what it would cost.

The Golden Bough

The way down was easy. The gate of Pluto stood open day and night. The difficulty was coming back.

To pass living through the kingdom of the dead and return, Aeneas needed to find a branch of gold growing on a tree in the forest near Lake Avernus. If fate meant him to go, the branch would break free at his touch. If fate did not mean it, no force on earth could tear it loose.

Aeneas went into the woods. Two doves - his mother Venus’s birds - flew ahead of him through the trees, settling and flying, settling and flying, until they landed on a single ilex oak. The branch gleamed among the dark leaves, gold against green, the way mistletoe shines on a winter tree it does not belong to. Aeneas reached up. The bough resisted for a moment, then snapped clean. He carried it back to the Sibyl.

She sacrificed four black-backed heifers at the mouth of a cavern beside Avernus. The lake was real - volcanic, treeless at its rim, so thick with fumes that birds flying over it dropped dead. The Romans would later call it the entrance. The Sibyl poured wine and blood into a trench cut in the earth, called on Hecate and the gods below, and the ground shook. In the darkness ahead, something opened.

The Crossing of the Styx

They went down through a landscape that was not landscape - the vestibule of the dead, where Grief and Disease and Old Age and Fear lived as shapes pressed against the walls. Aeneas drew his sword. The Sibyl told him to put it away. They were shades. Steel would pass through them like wind.

At the bank of the Styx, the dead crowded the shore in numbers beyond counting, reaching toward Charon’s boat. Charon, old and filthy, eyes like coals, poled across and back, across and back, but he took only some. The unburied he refused. They would wander the bank for a hundred years before he let them cross.

Aeneas saw men he knew among the refused - Trojans drowned when their ships broke apart, their bodies never recovered. He saw Palinurus, his helmsman, who had fallen overboard in the night and washed up on an Italian shore where the locals killed him and left his corpse on the rocks. Palinurus begged Aeneas to take him across. Aeneas could not. The Sibyl told Palinurus that the people of that shore would be visited by plague until they built him a tomb and gave the place his name, and this would have to be enough.

Charon challenged them at the waterline - no living flesh on his boat. The Sibyl showed the golden bough. Charon went silent and ferried them across in his groaning hull.

Dido’s Shade

Past the Styx, the dead were sorted. Infants in one field. The unjustly condemned in another. And in a third - the Fields of Mourning, thick with myrtle - those who had died of love.

Aeneas found Dido there. She was still bleeding from the sword wound she had given herself when he left Carthage. He had not known she was dead. He stopped, and his eyes filled, and he spoke to her gently. He told her he had not wanted to leave. The gods had commanded it. Italy was his fate, not his choice.

Dido would not look at him. Her face did not change. She turned and walked into the myrtle shadows where her first husband, Sychaeus, waited for her, and Sychaeus held her. Aeneas stood watching until the Sibyl pulled him forward.

The Parade of Souls

They passed Tartarus - a fortress of iron and a river of fire where the worst offenders suffered punishments Aeneas could hear but not see - and came at last to the Blessed Groves, the Elysian Fields, where the virtuous dead lived in clean light under a sky that had its own stars.

Anchises was there, in a green valley, reviewing the souls that waited beside the river Lethe to drink and forget and be born again as mortals. He saw Aeneas coming and wept. Aeneas tried three times to embrace him. Three times his arms closed on nothing.

Then Anchises turned to the river and began to point.

There - that soul - would become Silvius, Aeneas’s son by Lavinia, born after his father’s death, raised in the forests of Alba Longa. There - Romulus, son of Mars, who would found the city on seven hills. There - Augustus Caesar, who would close the gates of war. Between them, a procession stretching forward through centuries: the kings and consuls and generals of Rome, the whole weight of a civilization that did not yet exist, waiting in the bodies of the unborn for their turn at life.

Anchises showed him Marcellus last - a young man of extraordinary beauty who walked in shadow, his head bowed. He would be Augustus’s nephew, beloved, dead at nineteen. Even destiny had its losses.

The Gate of Ivory

When it was finished, Anchises led Aeneas and the Sibyl to two gates. One was made of horn, and through it true shades passed into the upper world. The other was made of ivory, polished white, and through it the underworld sent false dreams to the living.

Anchises sent them out through the gate of ivory.

Virgil never explained why. Scholars have argued the point for two thousand years. Perhaps the visions Aeneas saw were not quite truth but aspiration - Rome as it wished to see itself. Perhaps every man who returns from the dead carries something unreliable. Aeneas came up into the night air at Cumae, boarded his ships, and sailed north along the coast toward Latium, toward the war that waited for him, carrying in his memory every face his father had shown him beside the river of forgetting.