Aeneas’s Journey to the Underworld: Entry Point
Aeneas, the Trojan warrior, has finally made his way to the island of Sicily, where his father, Anchises, dies. Aeneas is drowning in despair and threatened by hostile gods when his father comes to him in a dream and instructs his son to sail for Italy and there to make the journey into the underworld to visit him. We read:
Inspired now by the plans of his old friend Aeneas is torn by anguish all the more as dark Night, looking up in her chariot, took command of the heavens, and all at once, down from the sky his father Anchises’ phantom seemed to glide and the words came rushing from him toward Aeneas: “My son, dearer to me than life while I was still alive! Oh my son, so pressed by the fate of Troy – I’ve come by the will of Jove, who swept the fire from your ships and now from the heights of heaven pities you at last. So come, follow old Nautes’ good sound advice: choose your elite troops, your bravest hearts, and sail them on to Italy. There in Latium you must battle down a people of wild, rugged ways. But first go down to the House of Death, the Underworld, go through Avernus’ depths, my son, to seek me, meet me there. I am not condemned to wicked Tartarus, those bleak shades, I live in Elysium, the luminous fields where the true and faithful gather. A chaste Sibyl will guide you there, once you have offered the blood of many pure black sheep. And then you will learn your entire race to come and the city walls that will be made your own.”
It is noteworthy that Aeneas gets instructions to visit the underworld in a dream, as these two states, as I have said, are closely linked in the ancient Roman imagination. Aeneas does as he is told. He sails for Italy and makes land on the beaches at Cumae, where he seeks out the Sibyl who will take him into the underworld. The Sibyl, after many admonitions and instructions, agrees to guide Aeneas and they start on their journey. Of note here is that like Alice’s descent into Wonderland or Joseph arrival at the Sanatorium, Aeneas and his guide do not immediately move from one realm to another – rather there is a journey of successive stages – a corridor through which they must pass. The beginning of the journey, like Alice’s, starts with a hole:
There was a vast cave deep in the gaping, jagged rock, shielded well by a dusky lake and shadowed grove. Over it no bird on earth could make its way unscathed, such poisonous vapors steamed up from its dark throat to cloud the arching sky…. And Sibyl says no more but into the yawning cave she flings herself, possessed – he [Aeneas] follows her boldly, matching her stride for stride.
This entry through the cave is a transition from the land of the living to the underworld, but this part of the underworld is not yet the realm of the dead. Nonetheless, Virgil pauses here to flex his poetic arts, connecting this passage from living realm to underworld directly to the transition from waking state to dream life. “You gods,” he implores, “who govern the realm of ghosts, you voiceless shades and Chaos – you, the River of Fire, you far-flung regions hushed in night – lend me the right to tell what I have heard, lend your power to reveal the world immersed in the misty depths of earth.” The underworld is equated with “night” – a metaphor that will be repeated throughout the chapter. But Virgil continues as his travelers move along toward their goal.
On they went, those dim travelers under the lonely night, through gloom and the empty halls of Death’s ghostly realm, like those who walk through the woods by a grudging moon’s deceptive light when Jove has plunged the sky in dark and the black night drains all color from the world. There in the entryway, the gorge of hell itself, Grief and the pangs of Conscience make their beds, and fatal pale Disease lives there, and bleak Old Age, Dread and Hunger, seductress to crime, and grinding Poverty, all, terrible shapes to see – and death and deadly Struggle and Sleep, twin brother of Death… There in the midst, a giant shadowy elm tree spreads her ancient branching arms, home, they say, to swarms of false dreams, one clinging tight under each leaf.”
Here we have a direct linkage of the underworld with dreams, the relationship between death and sleep. Both come at night and are defined, in part, by their darkness. The journey into the underworld, then, is a trip into a realm of “night” and even the tree stationed at the entrance is full of “swarms of false dreams.”
To pass from this ante-realm into the underworld proper, where souls find their places in the different realms of the dead, Aeneas and the Sibyl must cross the river Styx, carried by the ferryman, Charon. Charon’s words reinforce the link between death and sleep. “Stop,” he says to them, “whoever you are at our river’s edge, in full armor too! Why have you come? Speak up, from right where you are, not one step more! This is the realm of shadows, sleep and drowsy night.” Only when Charon, the son of Erebus and Night (mother of the furies, sister of Earth), ferries Aeneas and the Sibyl across the river Styx have they arrived into the realm of the dead, “the point of no return.”
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