In both theme and placement, Book VI, which many consider to be Virgil’s greatest literary accomplishment, is of central importance to the development and the ultimate meaning of the Aeneid. Here, just after the Trojans land permanently in Italy, Aeneas descends to the underworld for his long-anticipated rendezvous with Anchises’s ghost, who reveals Rome’s future to his son.
Virgil’s imagination and intellect create an otherworldly vision that invites readers to accept it as a symbolic statement concerning the nature of life after death. The possibility of reincarnation, which provides a philosophical basis for the pageant of souls about to be reborn as personages in Roman history, fuses Virgil’s speculations on the afterlife with the national theme that lies at the heart of the epic and is its whole reason for being.
The essential philosophical message of Book VI is that the soul, contaminated by its association with the body during mortal life, undergoes purgation after death. Passing on to Elysium, it remains there for a thousand years and is then reborn into the world. The cycles of death, purgation, and rebirth continue until, purified at last, the worthy soul ascends to a state of “fiery energy from a heavenly source.” A few exceptionally virtuous souls—like that of Anchises—are free from having to submit to this cyclical process, and they remain in Elysium. Although Virgil does not say so explicitly, presumably they too will ascend eventually to the nebulous Roman spiritual realm.
This cycle of death, purgation, and rebirth is the general interpretation that many commentators have given to the speech Anchises delivers to his son concerning the souls in Elysium. However, because Virgil is dealing with spiritual concepts that by their very nature do not permit a precise, literal expression, no common agreement exists as to these concepts’s exact meanings. They can be stated only in terms of symbols and metaphors that stand for a reality that lies beyond ordinary experience. Within this scheme of redemption, the souls of the very wicked, which have gone to Tartarus—hell’s equivalent—have no place, being beyond redemption. Of the souls Aeneas encounters elsewhere in the underworld, such as those in the Fields of Mourning, where he meets Dido, nothing is said.
Although Virgil’s underworld has an insubstantial, dreamlike quality, it is recognizably a place that is divided into various districts, whose inhabitants are classified according to either the natures of the deaths they suffered or the kinds of lives they lived. Its two most important realms lie in explicitly opposite directions: Tartarus to the left, Elysium to the right. This layout reflects Virgil’s concern with abstract concepts and principles, the best illustration of which is the setting of Aeneas’s meeting with his father, where almost every detail lends itself to a philosophical or historical interpretation. For example, Aeneas finds his father “deep in the lush green of a valley,” an image that emphasizes Anchises’s noble and peaceful character while he was alive: In Elysium, he is associated with wisdom and tranquillity because while he lived, he exemplified these traits. Considered as a whole, Virgil’s underworld appears to be essentially his own invention, although it contains many traditional details, such as Charon and his ferry; the five rivers—Acheron, Styx, Phlegethon, Cocytus, and Lethe; and the three-headed dog, Cerberus.
The underworld is not only clearly defined; it is also located in an actual region in Italy, in an area to the northwest of Naples where volcanic activity supposedly created an entrance into the underworld. Nearby was the town of Cumae (now Cuma), settled in 750 B.C.—later than the date of Aeneas’s purely legendary visit—by Greek colonists from Chalcis, in Euboea. Cumae was the center of a hereditary line of real sibyls—as opposed to the mythical Deiphobë—famous in the ancient world but almost extinct by Virgil’s time. As a resident of Naples, Virgil drew upon firsthand impressions of the actual temple of Apollo and the sibyls’s cave. These structures, of which only ruins survive, along with the natural surroundings, including Lake Avernus and the woods where Aeneas finds the talismanic golden bough, serve as the basis for Virgil’s fictional descriptions of them in Book VI, where everything appears transformed by the light of legend.
Many of the roles previously associated with Aeneas are present in Book VI. Chief among these models of behavior are his exemplary leadership abilities and his deep feelings of humanity. Told by Deiphobë that a Trojan warrior needs burial before Aeneas will be allowed to enter the underworld, the Trojan hero leads his men in offering the proper funeral rites for Misenus. Rather than merely instructing his men on what to do, Aeneas, deeply moved by his Trojan comrade’s death, performs the rituals himself: “All who were there / Clamored around the body in lament, / Aeneas, the good captain, most of all.” When he meets Dido, who now walks eternally in the Fields of Mourning, Aeneas poignantly weeps. Whether or not he was the primary cause of her demise consumes him: “Was I, was I the cause? / I swear by heaven’s stars, by the high gods, / By any certainty below the earth, / I left your land against my will, my queen. / . . . / And I could not believe that I would hurt you / So terribly by going.” Tears again come to his eyes when she ignores him and joins the spirit of her first husband. Ironically, although her passion has left her, Virgil characterizes her as a “burning soul,” which recalls the many images of fire associated with her in Book IV.
