By Meghan Reedy
How do you get to the underworld? In particular, how do you get there while you’re still alive?
The answer unfolds in careful, effective increments over the course of these lines, Aeneid 6.295–416.
In the lines just prior to these, Aeneas and the Sibyl, after completing the appropriate rituals, walked and walked through the dark in the woods until they reached an enormous elm tree—a truly enormous elm tree, surrounded by fantastical woodland beings (268–94).
From here, the way to the underworld begins simply: there is a path to the waters of Acheron, the river of Tartarus, hinc via Tartarei quae fert Acherontis ad undas (295). However, our attention is not drawn to it, since there is no description of this path.
Instead, in the very next line, it is as though the path has already been followed: in 296–97 we are given a description of what the shore is like, here where the river Acheron spills into the Cocytus. It sounds a frightening, dramatic place, where these two rivers meet. The Acheron is a wild, eddying whirl of water that boils out of a huge, muddy chasm and spews huge amounts of sand all into the Cocytus: turbidus hic caeno vastaque voragine gurges aestuat atque omnem Cocyto eructat harenam. This brief description is on the one hand simple scene setting, laying out key markers of the place where the next stage of Aeneas’ and the Sibyl’s journey will happen—the sand on the shore, for example, will be mentioned again (316). On the other hand, this place is extraordinarily dynamic: the water continually belching out of that chasm and the sand continually spreading and muddying the water it spews into. Even more than the fact of the sand or the fact of the rivers meeting, this inexorable motion establishes what this dreadful place feels like.
Now, though, starting in 298, we get to what really matters—which is the people (is that the right word?) who are here, or come through here. A full seven lines describe the one person who works here, the portitor Charon. He is as awful as the shore! He and the water are put very close together: portitor has horrendus aquas … servat (298). After the description of the place just above, the adjective horrendus seems apt for the water as easily as for the ferry-man—and indeed it is applied a little later to the banks themselves, ripas horrendas (327). There are details about the ferryman, so that we can picture Charon with some precision. What’s horrible is his frightful squalor: horrendus … terribili squalore (298–99), a squalor that shortly turns out to be as dynamic and vigorous as the horrible, mud-spewing shore. He has unruly white hairs growing from his chin (plurima mento canities inculta iacet, 299–300), his clothes are filthy and tied where they should be buckled (sordidus ex umeris nodo dependet amictu, 301), and he’s old (iam senior, 304)—but not in a human way. His eyes have a fire in them, stant lumina flamma (299), and he’s old in the harsh, fresh, spring-vigorous way the gods get old (cruda deo viridisque senectus, 304).
The huge crowd, whom we see next, are like the water of Acheron in 296–97; they are in constant, fluid motion: omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat (305). They are ‘poured out’ along the whole shore, effusa; they are rushing down, like water, ruebat.
What is eerie, however, and what Vergil shows us in three different ways, is that this turba is made up of distinct individuals … there are just so many. The first way this fact is shown is through a list of the sorts of people (is that the right word?) who make up the crowd. The list moves from adults towards increasingly young children, but it excludes the very old, starting rather with ‘wives and husbands,’ matres atque viri (306). The list ends with ‘children put onto the pyre before the parents’ eyes,’ impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum (307). The people listed here are all distinguished by their roles among other people, their family roles. The people in the list, in short, are people we can sympathize with.
The anomaly in the list are the heroes in 306–7. They too are implicitly linked with their community, distinguished not by their family role but by their great-heartedness (magnanimum heroum, 307)—but the phrasing highlights not their anima but their lifeless bodies: defuncta corpora vita (306). Through the description of the heroes, we are tipped off that everyone in the list is dead.
Two similes follow—two further means of showing us what the dead on the shore of the Styx are like. First, they are like leaves in the fall (quam multa … lapsa folia, 309–10). Dead, as dead leaves fall, and so many at once … but harmless, light, dry. Second, they are like birds coming in a flock off the cold ocean, arriving on a sunny shore (quam … aves ubi … terris immittit apricis, 311–12). They are so many, but they are active, moving with a purpose, aiming at the warmth of the other shore.
In the four quick lines that follow we glimpse how Charon and this huge, rushing, fluttery crowd interact: they are constantly asking to go across to the other shore (orantes transmittere cursum, 313–14), and he accepts some, but others he sends back far from the shore (315–16).
Until this point, we have been watching directly, so to speak; Vergil has been describing the place, the people, and their interactions. However, starting in 317, we are invited to see this place and its people through the eyes of people who are there: Aeneas’ (317–20, 331–36) and the Sibyl’s (321–30).
First, Aeneas is dazzled, miratus (317), and he doesn’t understand what is happening. In 318–20, he asks why Charon is taking some but not others––and in so doing he focuses our attention on this business of choosing. The Sibyl gives him a very full answer (321–30), explaining what this place is called, who it is that makes up the crowd, and what Charon is doing—he’s taking the buried across (sepulti, 326); the unburied have to wait on the shore for a hundred years, (centum errant annos, 329)—but when she is finished Aeneas’ attention returns to the business of choosing. He really thinks it over: constitit … multa putans (331–32), and the way the choice is not a choice but dumb luck (sortem, 332) upsets him, it seems unfair: sortemque animo miseratus iniquam (332).
Aeneas’ interpretation of what he has seen, and what has been explained to him, shapes our view of, and prepares us for, what comes next: Aeneas has friends among the unburied dead (333–36). Thus, Aeneas’ encounter with the dead has in every respect already begun, even though he has only reached the crossing place, the border.
Now that we know how it works normally, and that not even all of the dead get to go to the underworld, we come to the exception: how do the living get across?
Charon bars the way and cites damaging precedents that support the prohibition on living people being taken to the world of the dead (385–97); the Sibyl in return offers assurances that the precedents he cites do not apply, and she shows him the Golden Bough, which is what it takes for a living person to go to the underworld (398–407). Charon agrees at once. (Aeneas says and does nothing throughout the interchange.) Once you have the ticket, it turns out, it’s easy.
Thus, when the negotiation ends, all of the elements so carefully laid out up to this point come together, and everything gets used.
Charon turns his bluish boat and brings it over to the shore (caeruleam advertit puppim ripaeque propinquat, 410). Its benches are already full of other souls (alias animas, quae per iuga longa sedebant, 411), but Charon pushes them together, pushes them out of the way, deturbat (412; he ‘de-crowds’ the crowd), and he takes on board the enormous bulk that is Aeneas, accipit ingentem Aenean (413–14). Thus is Aeneas, huge with life, aboard the tiny boat thick with the light, dry, fluttery souls of the dead––and the boat groans under the weight, gemuit sub pondere cumba sutilis (414; even to the end we learn more, the boat is like Charon’s outfit, patched).
The final detail: the water, that muddy, murky water that was the first thing we saw of this place, seeps in through the leaky boat, multam accepit rimosa paludem (414).
Then they are across, and safe on the other shore (trans fluvium incolumis …, 415–16). Like the path from the elm down to the shore, the crossing itself happens between one line and the next.
Further Reading
Braund, S. ‘Virgil and the cosmos: Religious and philosophical ideas’ in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. C. Martindale (Cambridge, 1997) 204-21
Clark, R.J. ‘How Vergil expanded the underworld in Aeneid 6’ Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 47 (2001) 103-16
Johnston, P.A. ‘Juno’s Anger and the Sibyl at Cumae’ Vergilius 44 (1998) 13-23
Segal, C. ‘Aeternum per saecula nomen: the golden bough and the tragedy of history. Part 2’ Arion 5 (1966) 34-72
West, D. ‘The bough and the gate’ 17th Jackson Knight Memorial Lecture, Exeter University Publications (1987), reprinted in Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. S. Harrison (Oxford, 1990) 224-38
Williams, R.D. ‘The sixth book of the Aeneid’ Greece and Rome 11 (1964) 48-63, reprinted in Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. S. Harrison (Oxford, 1990) 191-207