The Aeneid

by Virgil

As mistletoe in the dead of winter’s icy forests leafs with life on a tree that never gave it birth, embracing the smooth trunk with its pale yellow bloom, so glowed the golden foliage against the ilex evergreen, so rustled the sheer gold leaf in the light breeze. Aeneas grips it at once—the bough holds back— he tears it off in his zeal and bears it into the vatic Sibyl’s shrine.

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.

“Away, away!” the Sibyl shrieks, “all you unhallowed ones—away from this whole grove! But you launch out on your journey, tear your sword from its sheath, Aeneas. Now for courage, 300 now the steady heart!” And the Sibyl says no more but into the yawning cave she flings herself, possessed— he follows her boldly, matching stride for stride.

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, and twisted, wicked Joys and facing them at the threshold, War, rife with death, and the Furies’ iron chambers, and mad, raging Strife 320 whose blood-stained headbands knot her snaky locks.

And here, 330 instantly struck with terror, Aeneas grips his sword and offers its naked edge against them as they come, and if his experienced comrade had not warned him they are mere disembodied creatures, flimsy will-o’-the-wisps that flit like living forms, he would have rushed them all, slashed through empty phantoms with his blade.

A huge throng of the dead came streaming toward the banks: mothers and grown men and ghosts of great-souled heroes, 350 their bodies stripped of life, and boys and unwed girls and sons laid on the pyre before their parents’ eyes.

Aeneas, 360 astonished, stirred by the tumult, calls out: “Tell me, Sibyl, what does it mean, this thronging toward the river? What do the dead souls want? What divides them all? Some are turned away from the banks and others scull the murky waters with their oars!”

And no spirits may be conveyed across the horrendous banks and hoarse, roaring flood until their bones are buried, and they rest in peace… A hundred years they wander, hovering round these shores till at last they may return and see once more the pools they long to cross.”

But once the ferryman, still out in the Styx’s currents, spied them moving across the silent grove and turning toward the bank, he greets them first with a rough abrupt rebuke: “Stop, 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. The law forbids me to carry living bodies across in my Stygian boat. I’d little joy, believe me, 450 when Hercules came and I sailed the hero over, or Theseus, Pirithous, sons of gods as they were with their high and mighty power. Hercules stole our watchdog—chained him, the poor trembling creature, dragged him away from our king’s very throne! The others tried to snatch our queen from the bridal bed of Death!” But

Aeneas of Troy, famous for his devotion, feats of arms, goes down to the deepest shades of hell to see his father. But if this image of devotion cannot move you, here, this bough”—showing the bough enfolded in her robes— “You know it well.”

At last, the river crossed, the ferryman lands the seer and hero all unharmed in the marsh, the repellent oozing slime and livid sedge.

The Sibyl, seeing the serpents writhe around his neck, tossed him a sop, slumbrous with honey and drugged seed, and he, frothing with hunger, three jaws spread wide, snapped it up where the Sibyl tossed it—gone.

The watchdog buried now in sleep, Aeneas seizes the way in, quickly clear of the river’s edge, the point of no return.

At that moment, cries— they could hear them now, a crescendo of wailing, ghosts of infants weeping, robbed of their share of this sweet life, at its very threshold too: all, snatched from the breast on that black day that swept them off and drowned them in bitter death.

But not without jury picked by lot, not without judge are their places handed down. Not at all.

Close to the spot, extending toward the horizon— the Sibyl points them out—are the Fields of Mourning, that is the name they bear.

Not even in death do their torments leave them, ever.

And wandering there among them, wound still fresh, Phoenician Dido drifted along the endless woods. As the Trojan hero paused beside her, recognized her through the shadows, a dim, misty figure—as one when the month is young may see or seem to see the new moon rising up through banks of clouds— that moment Aeneas wept and approached the ghost with tender words of love: “Tragic Dido, so, was the story true that came my way?

I left your shores, my Queen, against my will. Yes, the will of the gods, that drives me through the shadows now, these moldering places so forlorn, this deep unfathomed night— their decrees have forced me on.

But the Greek commanders and Agamemnon’s troops in phalanx, spotting the hero and his armor glinting through the shadows— blinding panic grips them, some turn tail and run 570 as they once ran back to the ships, some strain to raise a battle cry, a thin wisp of a cry that mocks their gaping jaws.

Trading words, as Dawn in her rose-red chariot crossed in mid-career, high noon in the arching sky, and they might have spent what time they had with tales if the Sibyl next to Aeneas had not warned him tersely: “Night comes on, Aeneas. We waste our time with tears.

This is the place where the road divides in two. 630 To the right it runs below the mighty walls of Death, our path to Elysium, but the left-hand road torments the wicked, leading down to Tartarus, path to doom.”

Here Cretan Rhadamanthus rules with an iron hand, censuring men, exposing fraud, forcing confessions 660 when anyone up above, reveling in his hidden crimes, puts off his day of atonement till he dies, the fool, too late.

“Here those who hated their brothers, while alive, or struck their fathers down or embroiled clients in fraud, or brooded alone over troves of gold they gained and never put aside some share for their own kin—a great multitude, these— then those killed for adultery, those who marched to the flag of civil war and never shrank from breaking their pledge to their lords and masters: all of them, walled up here, wait to meet their doom.

Some trundle enormous boulders, others dangle, racked to the breaking point on the spokes of rolling wheels.

“No, not if I had a hundred tongues and a hundred mouths and a voice of iron too—I could never capture all the crimes or run through all the torments, doom by doom.”

Aeneas springs to the entryway and rinsing his limbs with fresh pure water, there at the threshold, just before them, stakes the golden bough.

The rite complete at last, 740 their duty to the goddess performed in full, they gained the land of joy, the fresh green fields, the Fortunate Groves where the blessed make their homes.

And all, with snow-white headbands crowning their brows, flow around the Sibyl as she addresses them there, Musaeus first, who holds the center of that huge throng, his shoulders rearing high as they gaze up toward him: “Tell us, happy spirits, and you, the best of poets, what part of your world, what region holds Anchises? All for him we have come, we’ve sailed across the mighty streams of hell.”

“No one’s home is fixed. We live in shady groves, 780 we settle on pillowed banks and meadows washed with brooks. But you, if your heart compels you, climb this ridge and I soon will set your steps on an easy path.”

Three times he tried to fling his arms around his neck, three times he embraced—nothing…the phantom 810 sifting through his fingers, light as wind, quick as a dream in flight.

Struck by the sudden sight, 820 Aeneas, all unknowing, wonders aloud, and asks: “What is the river over there? And who are they who crowd the banks in such a growing throng?”

His father Anchises answers: “They are the spirits owed a second body by the Fates. They drink deep of the river Lethe’s currents there, long drafts that will set them free of cares, oblivious forever. How long I have yearned to tell you, show them to you, face-to-face, yes, as I count the tally out of all my children’s children. So all the more 830 you can rejoice with me in Italy, found at last.”

The seeds of life— fiery is their force, divine their birth, but they are weighed down by the bodies’ ills or dulled by earthly limbs and flesh that’s born for death. That is the source of all men’s fears and longings, joys and sorrows, nor can they see the heavens’ light, shut up in the body’s tomb, a prison dark and deep.

And so the souls are drilled in punishments, they must pay for their old offenses. Some are hung splayed out, exposed to the empty winds, some are plunged in the rushing floods—their stains, their crimes scoured off or scorched away by fire.

Each of us must suffer his own demanding ghost.

Then we are sent to Elysium’s broad expanse, a few of us even hold these fields of joy till the long days, a cycle of time seen through, cleanse our hard, inveterate stains and leave us clear ether...

But all the rest, once they have turned the wheel of time for a thousand years: God calls them forth to the Lethe, great armies of souls, their memories blank so that they may revisit the overarching world onc...

“So come, the glory that will follow the sons of Troy through time, your children born of Italian stock who wait for life, bright souls, future heirs of our name and our renown: I will reveal them all and tell you of your fate.

“Here, a son of Mars, his grandsire Numitor’s comrade—Romulus, bred from Assaracus’ blood by his mother, Ilia. See how the twin plumes stand joined on his helmet?

“Now turn your eyes this way 910 and behold these people, your own Roman people. Here is Caesar and all the line of Iulus soon to venture under the sky’s great arch.

Time and again you’ve heard his coming promised—Caesar Augustus! Son of a god, he will bring back the Age of Gold to the Latian fields where Saturn once held sway, expand his empire past the Garamants and the Indians to a land beyond the stars, beyond the wheel of the year, the course of the sun itself, where Atlas bears the skies 920 and turns on his shoulder the heavens studded with flaming stars.

“Now, the Decii and the Drusi—look over there—Torquatus too, 950 with his savage axe, Camillus bringing home the standards.

Battles, massacres—Caesar, the bride’s father, marching down from his Alpine ramparts, Fortress Monaco, Pompey her husband set to oppose him with the armies of the East.

“No, my sons, never inure yourselves to civil war, never turn your sturdy power against your country’s heart. You, Caesar, you 960 be first in mercy—you trace your line from Olympus— born of my blood, throw down your weapons now!

But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power the peoples of the earth—these will be your arts: to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.”

Oh, child of heartbreak! If only you could burst the stern decrees of Fate! You will be Marcellus.

And here Anchises, his vision told in full, escorts his son and Sibyl both and shows them out now through the Ivory Gate.

And they closely skirt the coasts of Circe’s land where the Sun’s rich daughter makes her deadly groves resound with her endless song, and deep in her proud halls she kindles fragrant cedar flaring through the night as her whirring shuttle sweeps her fine-spun loom.

But now Aeneas, still at sea, scanning the offing, spots an enormous wood and running through it, the Tiber in all its glory, rapids, whirlpools golden with sand and bursting out to sea.