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.
