Maaira Khan Y11 (London)
Virgil’s epic poem, the Aeneid, tells the story of Trojan warrior Aeneas’ voyage from fallen Troy to Italy, fulfilling his destiny and founding the Roman race. In Book 6 of the epic, the hero ventures down to the underworld with the Cumaean Sibyl, a prophetess and necromancer, in order to meet the shade of his dead father Anchises. What sets Virgil’s portrayal of the underworld apart from other Classical portrayals are his rather peculiar inconsistencies and the mixture of myth, morality and philosophy.
Upon Aeneas and the Sibyl’s entrance into the underworld, Virgil describes the house of Dis
as an‘empty hall’, using words such as vacua and inania (empty), a strange choice of adjectives seeing that the underworld he describes is so heavily populated. This is, in fact, a reference to Lucretian and Epicurean philosophies in which such terms were often used to describe a ‘void’ or ‘empty space’. In these two doctrines, afterlife and mythical monsters are disproven, and, though Virgil obviously does not continue to give a Lucretian description of the underworld, he is showing that his upcoming portrayal is open to interpretation, allowing himself to drift away from factual truth. Varying ideas from a range of philosophical schools enter the description. As Aeneas ventures on, he comes across designated areas for shades such as Tartarus and Elysium (interestingly similar to monotheistic ideas relating to heaven and hell), but also witnesses a parade of future Roman leaders, who, drinking from the River Lethe, are awaiting rebirth into new bodies. The former ideology in which the dead retain the same body and soul corresponds with the Homeric underworld in which Odysseus communicates with the dead in a Nekuia in Odyssey 11, whereas the latter metempsychosis (rebirth after death) is more of an Orphic-Pythagorean ideology—the Virgilian underworld brings these two beliefs together.
Continuing with Virgil’s bending of conventional beliefs relating to the afterlife is his explanation of Tartarus. Halfway along their wanderings through the underworld, Aeneas notices the terrible Tartarus, and the Sibyl explains that this is where the most wretched criminals are horrifically punished. The reader now witnesses a weird and wonderful mix-and-match of mythic characters and their traditionally corresponding punishments. For example, Ixion is a mythic character known to have been bound to an eternally turning fiery wheel (a punishment from Zeus for his attempt to seduce Hera). Yet his name is attributed to the famous punishment normally given to Tantalus (whenever he attempts to reach for an apple from a tree above him, the boughs of the tree move away; where we get the word tantalising!), and Ixion’s own punishment goes to another unnamed criminal. Many such errors arise in the passage. More important, furthermore, is the Roman overtone to the moral wrongdoings that the Sibyl describes. She talks about those who
‘“embroiled clients in fraud”’ (6.609), an allusion to the Roman system of patronage, and, rather than mentioning greed in general, tells Aeneas of men who ‘“over troves of gold they gained and never put aside some share for their own kin”’ (6.610-11). This peculiarity and Romanesque tone to crime and punishment in Virgil’s Tartarus shows how the punishment of the underworld is not just limited to conventional mythic characters, but has a specific time and place in the Roman world and applies to all. The physical centrality of the passage, being half-way through the book (line number-wise) and in the sixth book of a twelve book epic demonstrates how this moral code set out for a Roman audience is, quite literally, central to the Aeneid.
Another inconsistency that has a wide number of interpretations are the changes Virgil makes to deaths of characters who died earlier in the epic and are found in the underworld. A particularly interesting example relates to the death of Palinurus, the helmsman of Aeneas’ ship. In book 5, Palinurus is thrown off-board due to the actions of Poseidon and eventually drowns in stormy waters, but in Book 6 Palinurus says that his death was natural and that the sea was calm; was his death supernatural or natural? Though this could be considered a genuine error attributed to Virgil’s death before his final completion of the Aeneid, I prefer to consider this as having a purpose. Could Virgil be questioning Classical theology, and showing that the actions of the gods are, in fact, metaphorical descriptions of natural events? Could he be demonstrating that death is a means through which the real truth can be disclosed, and that what humans perceive in the world of the living is often flawed?
A final, and most certainly very haunting, part of the journey takes place right at the end of Book 6 when the Sibyl and Aeneas leave the underworld through the Ivory Gate, where ‘the dead send false dreams up towards the sky’ (6.896) as opposed to the Gate of Horn which is meant for ‘true shades,’ through which the Sibyl and Aeneas, as living humans, should ideally be passing through. Perhaps this is Virgil’s way of showing that both of them must have forgotten what took place in the underworld straight after they left, and how now Virgil and the reader are the sole retainers of this secret. Or this could even be questioning the very nature of life, and the flawed and dream-like perception and consciousness of living beings, as the two mortals are nothing more than a ‘false dream’.
To conclude, Virgil’s underworld stands apart from the rest of the epic, as well as conventional beliefs, and gives a rather haunting overview of what Virgil believes is the truth of crime and punishment, life and death, and, arguably most important of all, the moral principles that make up the Roman identity.
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