Aeneas, like Alice and Joseph, interacts with characters from the underworld – though he, unlike the latter two, remains distant and removed from the action around him. He becomes emotionally involved with characters he meets in the underworld but not otherwise involved in the life of the realm, as if he exists here as a tourist or spectator in the realm of the dead. Alice and Joseph, by contrast, inhabit their dream worlds completely.  Standing out as the most significant being on Aeneas’ journey is, without question, Anchises, Aeneas' deceased father.

Aeneas finds his father deep in a lush Elysium valley. Aeneas strides across the green fields and greets him. Anchises tells his son that he had dreamed he would come. Aeneas replies, “Your ghost, my father… your grieving ghost so often it came and urged me to your threshold.” Aeneas then moves in to embrace his father, but his father seems to him to pull back each time. Aeneas grows desperate. “So Aeneas pleaded, his face streaming tears. Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck, three times he embraced – nothing… the phantom sifting through his fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.” Again, Virgil purposefully makes the link between the underworld and the dream world. Anchises, like Joseph’s father in the Sanatorium, is both real and illusory, both alive and dead. People in this underworld are not material beings; they are shades or spirits, or from the perspective of the onlooker, they are visions.

After their emotional meeting, Anchises prophesizes to Aeneas about the future and explains to him aspects of cosmic order and the nature of humankind. Most importantly, Anchises tells a future history of Rome all the way until Virgil’s present-day and the rule of the emperor Augustus, who embodies the culmination of centuries of Roman imperial expansion and greatness.  A clear line is drawn between the two great characters in Roman history: the state to be established by Aeneas will find its ultimate expression under the rule of Augustus. The central “character” of this history is Rome itself. Emboldened by his father’s words, Aeneas is now ready to exit the underworld and return to his task of conquering Italy and establishing the foundations for the future glory of Rome.