In Book VI, we see one of the most
well-known parts of Virgil's Aeneid, the trip to the underworld.
We have of course seen such a thing in the Odyssey before but Virgil's is quite a bit
different. One thing we can observe to start off
with, is that Virgil's underworld has a different kind of function than it did in
Homer's epic. Recall in Homer's time, that when Homer
talks about Odysseus go the, going down to the underworld.
Odysseus goes down there, he's trying to find some knowledge about what he did
wrong and how he might right the wrong that is causing him all this suffering.
He's trying to find Tiresias and get some information from him about what's what
needs to get fixed. In, in going down there, it's pretty clear
that this underworld is a giant sort of holding cell.
It's just a place where dead. Spirits go, and all of them would rather
be alive. Not that much happens down there. There's
a few famous sinners that are being punished for eternity.
But mostly, everyone is in the same boat, they're all just gray and they all wish
they were alive. It's not as though there are good ones
over there getting treated well, and there are ones that aren't so good over there
are getting punished. That doesn't really happen in Homer's
underworld. Again, except for those few very famous
sinners who'd done awful things to the gods, they have punishments, but they're,
they're outliers. Now when we get to Virgil's underworld,
things are quite different. It is very carefully constructed by Virgil
as a place where ethical scores are settled.
Those that have done well in life get beautiful afterlives, and they have nice
long periods of joyful and happy things that surround their eternity.
For those that have had evil. That have been evil in their lives they
have awful afterlifes and they're actually physically punished.
Now this is a very different kind of world that we see happening in Virgil,
And quite a different, Quite a contrast from what happens in
Homer. There are intervening traditions that
Virgil's working off of that are helping him build this notion of what the
afterlife is about based on precedents that exist in Roman theological ideas,
Roman ideas about the gods. And also going back to some current Greek
materials, especially in Pythagorean philosophy and an example of this,
approached the underworld, actually shows up in Plato's republic in book ten, way
back in classical Athens. It's not at all a normal belief at the
time Plato is talking about it, but after Virgil makes the underworld look like
this, it becomes very normal in the west, and as it's adopted into Christian
theology, this idea of the after life as a place where ethical scores are settled, is
very much a, a regnant idea. but we're getting to see it here, really in, in it's
most powerful mythical form in Virgil's Aeneid in book six.
Virgil gets, very specific about what happens.
The details here are spelled out in a way that, you know, Virgil's bringing his
rationalizing brain to bear, on this question of the underworld.
And Homer was, pretty foggy. Odysseus went far away.
He landed, and, and, and the, spirits came out of a cave to come talk to him.
Virgil we see a full architecture, of things and a, a, a way that everything
works. Now the afterlife is a, the underworld is
a tricky place as we know. It's, easy to go down, but very hard to
come back. We hear this in lines 185 to 90 and our
translation, that we're using for this class. it's, of course, easy to find your
way to the underworld. Death is too close to any of us and sadly,
close to all of us. We are fragile creatures.
So, it's easy to get down there. But coming back, that's the tricky part.
So Aeneas is going to have to try and figure out a way to disrupt the regular
order of things, make his way there but then somehow also come back.
The Sibyl tells him that there is going to be a way for him to do this.
He is going to have to find a, very special piece of foliage.
There is a thing called the Golden Bough, made famous in mythology.
Wonderfully resonant poetic image in Virgil,
Made famous in contemporary circles. When James Joyd, George Frazier decided to
name a seminal work in the study of mythology, in the early 1900's, he decided
to name it Golden Bough, after this, And from then it became I think really
firmly established in at least contemporary study of mythology, this
image. So let's take a look at what happens.
Recall that when the Sibyl announces it to Virgil, she tells him that he'll have to
go and find this bough. The bough is there,
And Sibyl tells him that it will come willingly and easily if you are called by
fate. Page 215.
Sorry, line 215, she says. But the and, and she further says that if
you're not called by fate, there's no way you could rip it off, no matter how
strongly you pull. So it's either going to come off willingly
and easily or there's no way you would be able to pull it off.
Okay so if you're fated to go it will basically fall off in your hands.
And if you're not fated to go there's no way you'll be able to get that thing off.
Take a look at what happens though looking on page 167 in our translation.
It's lines 295 and following. What really happens when Aeneas goes
there. The lines are as written up here on our
screen. So bright amid the dark leaves green ilex
shown the golden leafage rustling in light wind.
Aeneas at once briskly took hold of it and though it clung greedily broke it off,
Then carried it to the Sibyl's cave. Now it's not entirely clear here what
happens, But Virgil spells out what seems to be a
pretty clear middle way between the two distinctive and mutually exclusive
possibilities that the Sibyl gave us. Either it will fall off in your hand if
you're fated, Or no matter how hard you pull, you'll
never be able to get it off. Well, it doesn't fall off in Aeneas's
hand. And he's not foiled in his attempt to yank
the thing off. He briskly takes hold of it, and though it
clung, he greedily broke it off and carried it back to the Sibyl's cave.
So, we're given here a possibility that the Sibyl seems to rule out, and it's a
classic moment of Virgil, taking a circumstance that he's already set up and
giving us very clear possibilities, and then he finds a middle way through to say,
actually, something else kind of happened. He doesn't then come back and explain it
to us and say, oh, by this I meant to say, but he leaves it in there as a point of
incongruity in the story. This way of leaving shadows in his text,
blank spaces, spots that don't seem like they make sense according to the
parameters that he himself set up. We saw this in the case of the marriage
and. Dido and Aeneas in the cave, it's tricky
to figure out what happened there, and in the case of the golden bow, it's tricky as
well. Was.
Virgil, was Aeneas supposed to pull that bough off?
Was he fated to be there? Well, we don't really hear, that he was,
because it doesn't fall off in his hand. But, we also don't hear that he wasn't
fated to be there because, he is able to yank it off.
And Virgil says that, if, he weren't, fated to be there, he would never have
been able to get it off. So from that, with that detail not
resolved we head off, and head down to the underworld.
There are invocation of underworld gods that Virgil gives us as we move down,
descending into the into the cave, we hear about Hecate, and Night, and Earth, and
Proserpina, who is our Roman name for Persephone.
This world is definitely down below. We're moving down with Aeneas and the
Sibyl. Virgil shows us an architecture that is
very elaborate and detailed and has a strong downward trajectory.
Sadness and death are personified around us.
We see these scary things that are happening.
But Virgil reassures us in line 400 in our translation that these are empty monsters,
so we shouldn't really be scared of them. We're down in the underworld where there
is no substance of things. So there can't be substance that could
physically harm you in the form of these nasty things floating around.
They're just shades. This is Virgil as a rationalizing,
Scientific kind of mind. looking at his fantasy of what the underworld is all
about. We then, on our way to the point where
we're going to cross over the River Styx and move into limbo and other stages of
the underworld. On our way there, we run into a figure,
don't we? This man Palinurus. We saw him mentioned at the end of our last book. He
is, remember hand on the tiller, guiding the ship away.
And, he turns out to die but we don't know it. so we run into him in that way, very
much parallel to how the role that Elpenor played in the Odyssey.
Remember him? We had in Homer's telling of the tale,
Elpenor died unbeknownst to us. We go down to the underworld, we meet
Elpenor. Hey, what are you doing here?
Elpenor tells us, hey, come on, bury me. The dead want to be buried.
And then, after the underworld, we come out and we meet and bury Elpenor.
Well, it works a little bit like this, but Palinurus is not fulfilling the full story
here. We also have Palinurus and Misenus
together. Palinurus comes up and tells us, I'm dead,
You didn't know it, and I want to be buried we learn from, from the Sibyl that
he's going to buried by the locals where he died, so we're not going to bury him at
the end of our stage. But we do need to, to carry on.
So we're just going to move forward and in the mean time, we made up with Misenus,
who is someone that is already dead, who's been buried and we're going to see him on
the other side. So in a typical Virgilian spin he takes
one character of Elpenor and splits him into two, both Misenus and Palinurus play
different parts of Elpenor's role for us. We then,
Through the Sibyl's encouragement and nudging and showing off the golden bough,
we get ourselves across the River Styx on Charon's boat.
But notice what happens when Virgil, an embodied human being, hops onto a boat
that's meant to carry shades, The boat is creaking under the weight.
Again, this is Virgil as a rationalizer, trying to figure out what would it be like
if some embodied human being went down to the underworld.
It reminds me a little bit of what great science fiction writers in contemporary
genres do today. They take the laws of physics, such as
they know them, and then try to insert them into worlds of extreme, bending of
those laws, but they hold on to the ones they can in this world of bent laws.
Well, that's happening here, with Virgil, too, as the Charons' boat is creaky.
They then get across the river, Lines 516 following in our translation.
We meet this dog Cerberus, who guards the underworld, toss him a cake, that keeps
him quiet and lets us get across. At that point we enter into the realm of
Limbo. We see in limbo the untimely dead. These are figures like infants, those who
have been unjustly condemned, suicides, those who died for love, and wouldn't you
know it, we meet up with Dido there. It's a sad place, not a good place to be,
and it's a spot that's reserved for people who have not necessarily done wrong
things, it's just that they died in a way that,
Yet the circumstances did not allow them to experience the full pleasure, that's
possible in an afterlife, and we're going to see what that is.
That's waiting for us around the corner. We see our judges operating down there,
Minos is making judgement on souls and sending them one direction or another.
As we make our way down, we see, whole mix of people who are Mixed up in nasty stuff.
And eventually we get down to Tartarus and there, here's where all the very worst
sinners are. Aeneas is curious.
He wants to go see this. And Sibyl says no.
You can't go down there, it's too nasty. Rhadamanthus acts as judge down there and
awful things get dealt with in awful ways. And she then, instead, describes it.
At this point then she says we've gotta get on our way, and we hear a description
from Virgil on page 178 that dawn crosses the meridian.
Dawn is crossing the meridian. Here we are at the bottom of our
underworld. And if dawn is crossing the meridian, what
does that exactly mean? We're, we're in the underworld.
How, how is it that dawn could be crossing past us?
And then she goes on to describe night arrives Aeneas.
Well if dawn is crossing the meridian how is it that night is arriving?
Well it could be that what Virgil is talking about here is the, is the
topsy-turvy world that we're in. If dawn is crossing the meridian up in the
upper spheres than it could be that night is arriving in the lower spheres.
And since we're down below we're seeing night arrive as dawn is crossing the upper
Meridian. But it's really hard to tell.
We're stuck down here, with Broydal in the underworld, , It's a wonderful
representation here, you wouldn't wanted to live inside of this mans mind, but one
of the most famous representations of Virgils underworld, since we have it from
Broydal, you wouldn't want to spend a lot of time down here, and, Sibyl is anxious
and ready to move on. Saying to Aeneus, come on, let's get
going!" The world is topsy turvy, it's really hard to peg exactly where we are,
but I think that, Virgils giving us some clues with dawn across the meridian, and
night arriving. At, at that point we move away, thank
goodness, from this. Nasty bits that we see.
People getting punished all over the place.
And we start to move into a different kind of world.
It's brighter and it's lighter. The figure that we see first is Aeneas,
Anchises, Aeneas's father, and he's going to introduce us to what's happening over
here. And at the same time give us an
explanation, some larger explanation of a lot of the things that we've been seeing
already so far in the underworld.