Saddened by the loss of Palinurus, Aeneas leads his fleet to Cumae, where Deiphobë, the sibyl of Cumae, is led by Achatës to Aeneas while he is visiting a temple built to honor Apollo. She tells Aeneas to sacrifice seven young bulls and seven ewes to Apollo, after which she leads the Trojan prince into a cavern with a hundred mouths that amplify her voice when she delivers Apollo’s prophecies. Aeneas prays to Apollo for help in his endeavors to find a new homeland for his people.
Following Aeneas’s petition to Apollo, Deiphobë, possessed now by Apollo, predicts much hardship ahead for the Trojans in Italy: They will fight a bloody war, and Juno will continue to oppose them. Aeneas tells the sibyl that he is accustomed to trouble and has already foreseen that many more difficulties lie ahead. Wanting to descend to the underworld in order to visit the spirit of his father, he begs her for help in going there.
The sibyl tells Aeneas that he must find and pluck a golden bough from a tree in an adjacent forest. The bough will allow him to enter the underworld. First, however, he must find and bury the body of a dead comrade. Returning to the beach, Aeneas discovers that the dead man whom the sibyl mentioned is the trumpeter Misenus, who was drowned by the sea god Triton for daring to challenge him in a trumpeting contest.
While hacking pine trees to construct a proper funeral pyre for Misenus, Aeneas sees twin doves, which he instinctively knows were sent by his mother, Venus. The doves lead him to the golden bough, and Aeneas seizes it and takes it to the sibyl’s cave. Afterward, he and his companions give their fallen comrade the due rites of cremation and burial.
With these tasks completed, Deiphobë leads Aeneas to the underworld’s entrance, a deep cavern at whose threshold sacrifices are made to the gods of darkness. Aeneas and Deiphobë descend through a gloomy region haunted by dreadful spirits and monsters and eventually reach Acheron, one of the underworld’s rivers. Here, Aeneas beholds Charon, the ancient boatman who ferries spirits of the dead across the river, and he observes that the bank on which he stands is suddenly crowded with other spirits, all anxious to cross the river. The sibyl informs him that some of these spirits must wait a hundred years for passage over the river, or until their bodies on earth are buried. Among these, Aeneas encounters Palinurus, who begs to be allowed to cross over with him. Deiphobë chides Palinurus for wanting to break a divine decree, but she also consoles him: In time, a tomb will be built for him, and a cape of land will be named in his honor.
Charon is at first reluctant to ferry Aeneas, a living man, across the river Acheron, but he changes his mind when Deiphobë, commending Aeneas, shows the boatman the golden bough. Disembarking on the other shore, Aeneas and the sibyl find themselves among the wailing souls of dead infants; then, as they proceed, among the spirits of those who were executed for crimes they did not commit; and then among the suicides. They come at last to the Fields of Mourning, the home of those who died of love. Here, Aeneas meets the ghost of Dido. Knowing now that Dido killed herself because he abandoned her, he tries to justify himself to her, saying that he left her unwillingly. Unforgiving, Dido’s ghost withdraws from Aeneas and seeks the comforting presence of the spirit of her husband, Sychaeus, with whom she has been reunited.
Aeneas and Deiphobë now come to the fields inhabited by the spirits of men famous in battle, Trojans and Greeks among them. Men who were Aeneas’s former companions warmly greet him, but his former enemies fearfully shun him. Among the Trojans he meets is the spirit of Priam’s son Deïphobus, who married Helen after the death of Paris, but who was betrayed by her and her first husband, Menelaus, who, with Ulysses, inflicted upon him hideous and fatal wounds that he still bears.
Warned by Deiphobë that time is passing, Aeneas prepares to take his leave of Deïphobus, who describes the two possible paths available to Aeneas and the sibyl. To the left lies the region of Tartarus, a place of eternal punishment for the wicked; to the right lies Elysium, Aeneas’s destination. Looking back, Aeneas glimpses Tartarus, the prison of the Titans, whom the gods defeated, and of those who tried to rival Jupiter. Also punished in Tartarus’s realm are mortals who have sinned abhorrently, including adulterers, traitors, and incestuous perverts.
At last Aeneas and Deiphobë reach Elysium, which they enter after Aeneas places the golden bough on its threshold as an offering. They now find themselves in the Blessed Groves, a region of beautiful meadows inhabited by blessed spirits, among them Anchises’s. Escorted by the soul of the poet Musaeus, they find Anchises deep in a lush green valley, surveying the spirits of his future Roman descendants. After an exchange of emotional greetings with his father, Aeneas asks about a river that he sees in the distance and about the souls that hover “as bees” over it. Anchises tells him that the river is named Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and that the spirits filling the air formerly lived on earth in human bodies; having lost all memory of their former existence after drinking the water of Lethe, these souls are awaiting their turn to be born again in new bodies, with new identities that have already been assigned to them.
When Aeneas asks his father to explain reincarnation to him, Anchises describes a pageant of historical personalities who would have been already familiar to Virgil’s Roman readers, but who are described from the vantage point of Aeneas and Anchises in Elysium as belonging to the future of a city yet to be founded. Among the spirits that Anchises points out are Silvius, Aeneas’s son by Lavinia and the founder of a race of kings; Romulus, founder of Rome; and the descendants of Aeneas’s son, Ascanius, the Julian family, whose glory will reach its peak with Augustus, “son of the deified.” This “deified” god, Julius Caesar, is also present. The pageant ends on a note of mourning: Last to be identified is young Marcellus, Augustus’s nephew and heir, who died at the age of nineteen.
The pageant completed, Anchises leads Aeneas and Deiphobë to the two gates of sleep, one of which is made of horn, the other of ivory. Passing through the second gate, Aeneas and the sibyl return to the world of the living.
