They then get across the river and meet the three headed dog Cerberus, who guards the underworld. They give him some honey and drugged meal that keeps him quiet and allows them to get across.
At that point they enter the realm of Limbo where we see the untimely dead. These are figures like infants, those who have been unjustly condemned, suicides, those who died for love, and they meet Dido there. We see judges operating down there; Minos is making judgement on souls and sending them in one direction or another. Eventually they reach down to Tartarus where all the very worst sinners are. Rhadamanthus acts as judge down there and awful things get dealt with in awful ways.
She describes some of the awful things that happen. We hear a description from Virgil that dawn crosses the meridian.
Then the Sybil warns that night is coming and they have to move on Dawn is crossing the meridian. It could be that Virgil is talking about the, is the topsy-turvy world that they are in. If dawn is crossing the meridian up in the upper spheres then it could be that night is arriving in the lower spheres.
They will see night arrive in the underworld as dawn is crossing the upper Meridian. The Sibyl is anxious and ready to move on. Virgil gives some clues with dawn across the meridian, and night arriving. They meet Anchises in the underworld and we see the larger point of why Aeneas had to go down there. Anchises tells him about how the universe works, about the larger structure of the Cosmos from a scientific standpoint. Virgil works from multiple precedence not necessarily Homeric.
Some are Homeric antecedents but there are closer ones in the second part of Book six that come from other literary sources.
This is a long narrative story about a soldier that dies. During his death it is revealed to him, in his trip to the afterlife, the whole structure of the Cosmos and how everything works. Then in Cicero in the famous part of his own republic, his final book called the Dream of Scipio. Near East that was called Apocalypse.
Some ancient Apocalypses talk about the end of the world, a very famous one, The Book of Revelations, that closes off the Christian Bible. Not all Apocalypses talk about the end of the world, they had literature based on Revelation or Unveiling. So, an apocalypse is an unveiling of some hidden truth. In this genre of literature, it always happens that someone has a, hidden truth about how the universe works unveiled to him or her.
The whole history is read out at that point and the workings of the Cosmos are unveiled. We hear from Anchises who leads us along, and he begins a series of observations on how the whole universe works. Aeneas asks his father to tell him it all works. Anchises replies. From Spirit come the races of man and beast. The life of birds, odd creatures the deep sea contains beneath her sparkling surfaces. And fiery energy from a heavenly source belongs to the generative seeds of these so far as they are not poisoned or clogged by mortal bodies, their free essence dimmed by earthiness and deathliness of flesh.
Anchises from the standpoint of the start of scientific observation talks about the elements and the planets and the Cosmos, and a divine mind and spirit that flow through everything borrowing from different philosophical schools of his time including Stoicism. He builds up a picture of the universe. Aeneas becomes educated on how the whole cosmos functions.
This is the message that Aeneas gets in the underworld. As the story continues and Anchises continues to reveal the basic structure of things he soon enough gets to Augustus.
We hear about Augustus from Anchises. The truth is even Alcides never traversed so much earth. Alcides is a name for Hercules it means descendent of Alcaeus. Virgil is telling us something that is undoubtedly true, and that is a stunning thing to be true. If we take the most glorious fantastic mythical legends of Heracles the Roman Hercules, his dominion over the over the earth, how far he travelled, the amazing things he did, and all the labours that he completed far beyond what any human being is capable of.
Virgil is saying that we live in a time where real historical figures are doing things that are even grander than myths. Fact and historical truth is outdoing mythological fantasy. Augustus is doing something that even Hercules could never have imagined doing. He continues with further discussion of this Roman-ness and then about avenging the Trojan ancestors by eventually conquering Greece. Although the Greeks beat the Romans back in Troy eventually, Rome gets its dominance.
They get revenge for the theft of the Palladium and the rape of Cassandra. Anchises lays it out for him exactly what the idea of Rome is. And bring more life-like portraits out of marble, argue more eloquently, use the pointer to trace the paths of heaven accurately and accurately foretell the rising of stars.
The Romans might have been a little bit worried about what Roman-ness was all about. Here they hear from Anchises, in this moment of revelatory truth about the way the whole Cosmos is structured, bleeding into history, moving into an identity of Rome, this is what it is to be Roman.
The point of all of this, you Romans, is to make the Earth work right. The historical importance of this message is extremely powerful. In Greek mythology , Tartarus, or Tartaros, is both a deity and a place in the underworld - even lower than Hades.
In ancient orphic sources and in the mystery schools Tartaros is also the unbounded first-existing "thing" from which the Light and the cosmos is born. The Greek poet Hesiod asserts that a bronze anvil falling from heaven would fall 9 days before it reached the Earth.
The anvil would take 9 more days to fall from Earth to Tartarus. As a place so far from the sun and so deep in the earth, Tartarus is hemmed in by 3 layers of night, which surrounds a bronze wall which in turn encompasses Tartarus. It is a dank and wretched pit engulfed in murky gloom. It is one of the primordial objects, along with Chaos, Earth, and Eros, that emerged into the universe. While, according to Greek mythology, Hades is the place of the dead, Tartarus also has a number of inhabitants.
When Cronus , the ruling Titan , came to power he imprisoned the Cyclopes in Tartarus. Zeus released them to aid in his conflict with the Titan giants. The gods of Olympus eventually defeated them and they were cast into Tartarus.
They were guarded by giants, each with 50 enormous heads and strong arms, who were called Hecatonchires. Later, when Zeus overcame the monster Typhus , the offspring of Tartarus and Gaia, he threw it, too, into the same pit. Tartarus is also the place where the punishment fits the crime.
Aeneas asks Palinurus if Apollo's oracle had lied, and some god had killed him. Palinurus says, "No, no god killed me.
The rudder broke while I was leaning on it, and I fell into the water. Then I swam ashore, but some locals killed me. Anyhow, some other locals are going to bury your body soon enough — and then they are going to name that cape of land after you. Then up paddles Charon, the ferryman, and addresses Aeneas and the Sibyl as follows: "Whaddaya want? Then she reveals the golden bough. That does the trick, and Charon takes them across.
Once they get to the other side, Aeneas and the Sibyl see various dead people. Aeneas sees Dido, and approaches her. He tells her he is sorry, and how it wasn't his fault for leaving her: he was only doing the gods' bidding, just as he is now. But Dido doesn't listen to him. Instead, without a word, she runs off to join the shade of her dead husband, Sychaeus.
Next Aeneas sees some dead Trojan warriors — plus some Greeks, who scatter when he approaches. Then he catches sight of Deiphobus, a Trojan warrior.
His face shows that he has been cruelly mutilated. Deiphobus, who had married Helen after the death of Paris, says that his wife is to blame. During the fall of Troy, she let her former husband, Menelaus, and Ulysses into their bedroom, and the two of them went at him. He asks what Aeneas is doing there, but before he can answer, the Sibyl taps her watch OK, points to the sky and says that they've got to get a move on. Deiphobus says, "That's cool.
Peace out. The path on the left leads to Tartarus, the black pit of hell. The one on the right leads toward Elysium, where the blessed go. The Sibyl tells Aeneas about the horrible torments suffered by the souls in Tartarus.
Then she tells him again to hurry up. They go to the gates of Proserpina's palace where, after performing a cleansing ritual, he leaves the golden bough.
After that, he and the Sibyl head to Elysium — the ultimate chill-out zone, a. Club Dead. They go up to Musaeus, an ancient singer and poet, and ask where Anchises is. Musaeus directs him to the spot. There they find Anchises watching the souls preparing for rebirth.
Aeneas and Anchises share a tearful reunion. Then Aeneas catches sight of the thousands of souls crowding around a nearby river. He asks Anchises, "What gives? They are drinking from the River Lethe, whose waters will wipe clean their memory of their previous lives.
Aeneas says, "Why would they want to live again? Anchises explains that everything that exists — including things like the sky, the land, the water, the moon, sun, and stars, as well as living creatures — is permeated with Spirit. This Spirit occasionally becomes part of living things. When this happens, though, the body pollutes the spirit and clouds its vision.
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