view entire post series on Virgil's Aeneid here
The geography of the Roman underworld is a rather fascinating, (and I admit, morbid to some) study. There's a kind of cool map here by Carlos Parada. Aeneas is guided by the Sibyl. This need for a companion and guide to the underworld is something which Dante will pick up on when Virgil himself accompanies Dante into the regions of the Inferno.
From the river over which no soul returns (VI.573)
Virgil’s underworld is a strangely familiar to us, not in the least because many of the ideas he transmitted to western culture are either broadly recognizable in a variety of cultures, or because of the influence he had on subsequent millennia. Or both. Upon venturing only a few steps, Aeneas hears the sounds of “the souls of infants wailing” (VI.576), and the souls of those who were “falsely accused, condemned to die”(VI.580). Next to these he sees the suicides, and Dido among them. Aeneas tries to move her, and in a pitiable scene she refuses to acknowledge him, “Her face no more affected than if she were Immobile granite or Marpesian stone” (VI.632) Over all this “Minos reigned as presiding judge” (VI.584).
No underworld would be worth a story if it did not feature judgment. Judgment in the proper sense of the word is really simply discernment between good and evil. This is visualized as a fork in the road: the Sibyl tells Aeneas
Where the road forks: on the right hand it goes
Past mighty Dis’s walls, Elysium way
Our way; but the leftward road will punish
Malefactors, taking them to Tartarus
(VI. 726)
Aeneas begs the Sibyl to tell him more about the realm from which he hears such groans and cries. This, Aeneas is told, is where the Cretan Rhadamanthus is appointed judge. He brings all the sins of the offenders to light. Those who put off atonement in their earthly life are merely “thieves of time” (766); they put off amendment of life “until too late, until the hour of death”.
There is a certain logic to the underworld, and here we can see at least some of the logic by which Dante arranged the punishments of the Inferno in the Divine Comedy. Dante of course added much more detail, and followed Augustine’s dictum from the Confessions that “every man’s inordinate affection becomes his own affliction”. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. What does Aeneas learn as he goes? First we have those of the old race – the Titans – who rebelled against the Olympians. Rebellion against the Olympian gods is the first offense. The old forces of nature and chaos are plunged deep into Tartarus. Next we see Salmoneus, who committed blasphemy by “mimicking Jove’s fire” (VI.787).
After those who directly offended the gods come those who “held brothers hateful, beat their parents, cheated/ Poor men dependent on them” (VI. 814). These have offended against the basic structures of family and community. Next we have men “killed for adultery” and those who betrayed their lords – oathbreakers, whether of the marriage vow or the civil vow.
We are also told of those who broke the laws of the city – ones who “set up laws or nullified them for a price” (VI.831), and then those who broke the laws of nature – “another entered his daughter’s room to take a bride forbidden him” (VI. 834).
The lesson is clear: “Be warned and study justice, not to scorn the immortal gods” (829).
But it is Aeneas’ fate to walk through the Elysium fields, that region of “happy souls” (895). Again, in a fashion related to the punishments for vices, we have in lines 870 to 890 a set of virtues which have earned these souls a place among the blessed. They are ones who honoured the gods (“chorused out a hymn praising Apollo), were faithful to their vows (“in battle for their country”) or built up the civic and familial order. It is in this region that Aeneas meets the shade of his father Anchises, but the embodied man cannot grasp the spirit of his father, which is “weightless as wind and fugitive as dream” (942).
Anchises gives his son some instruction about the nature of the soul and the body (VI.973ff). For Virgil the soul is "imprisoned in the darkness of the body" (987); there is a process of purification by which souls are freed from the "deathliness which comes from flesh" (985); purity is achieved (proto-purgatory) and souls may rise again to earthly existence. It is quite a contrast with the view of flesh and body which will become part of the Christian story only a few decades later. For Virgil, the Incarnation would be an unthinkable horror - an impossibility.
Next Aeneas sees the souls of the future leaders of Rome. And it is here in the underworld that we see the genius of Rome and the key to her destiny: "Illustrious Rome will bound here power with earth/ Her spirit with Olympus" (VI.1047). This is the Incarnation of Rome: the joining of the earthly and the heavenly in the rise of Empire under Augustus.
Who shall bring once again the Age of Gold (1064).
Rome will bring about a new kind of kingdom:
Earth’s peoples – for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law,
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud”
(VI. 1151)
You can almost hear a faint echo of the hopes of Christian messiahship. Virgil’s humanist vision of the message of Isaiah: every valley raised and every mountain made low. It can make one think about the Christian phrase "In the fullness of time". With Virgil and with Christ there are competing visions of body and spirit, kingdom, empire, eternal city, son of the deified...
Comments