The descent into the underworld

The fleet lands at Cumae, on the Italian coast north of Naples. Aeneas climbs to the temple of Apollo and finds the Sibyl in her cave. The prophecy comes through her in pieces — wars in Italy worse than the war at Troy, a foreign bride who will be the cause as Helen was. He asks her to take him down to find his father. She agrees on conditions: he must bury a man who lies unburied on the shore, and find a golden bough as a gift for Persephone. He goes back and finds Misenus, his trumpeter, drowned that morning. He buries him. Two doves, his mother's birds, lead him to the bough.

They descend at midnight through a cave at Lake Avernus. What follows is the most famous descent into the underworld in classical literature, and the model for Dante's Inferno. They cross the Styx; they pass the unburied waiting a hundred years; the souls of children weeping; the lovers in the Fields of Mourning, where Dido is among them. Aeneas, weeping, swears he left her against his will. She turns her face away and walks back into the shade with her first husband Sychaeus. They pass the warrior dead. They come to the fork: Tartarus left, Elysium right. They go right.

Anchises is there, in a green valley by the river Lethe. Aeneas tries three times to embrace him; three times the embrace passes through air. Anchises explains the metaphysics — souls drink of Lethe to forget their old lives and come back into bodies — and then shows his son, in a long parade, the souls who will become Romans: Silvius, Romulus, Numa, the kings; the consuls of the Republic; Julius Caesar; Augustus, who will bring back the golden age. The catalogue ends with a sudden grief: the young Marcellus, Augustus's heir-apparent, who will die at nineteen. Aeneas asks how the future can hold such suffering. Anchises has no answer. He sends his son out through the ivory gate of false dreams.