He bids his chief take counsel, too, with Acestes. In the visions of the night the shade of his father Anchises once more appears to him, and gives the same advice as Nautes. It is settled that the women and the old men, and all that are weary and faint-hearted, shall be left behind in Sicily, while the picked band of good men and true sail on with their leader into the west; thus their reduced number of ships will yet suffice them.[31] The damaged galleys are hastily repaired, and the foundations of a new town are marked out for the Trojan settlers: it is to be called Acesta, in honour of their kind host. The parting of the wanderers from their friends is a fine passage, finely rendered:—
“With kindliness of gentle speech
The good Æneas comforts each,
And to their kinsman prince commends
With tears his subjects and his friends.
Three calves to Eryx next he kills;
A lambkin’s blood to Tempest spills,
And bids them loose from land:
With olive-leaves he binds his brow,
Then takes his station on the prow,
A charger in his hand,
Flings out the entrails on the brine,
And pours a sacred stream of wine.
Fair winds escort them o’er the deep:
With emulous stroke the waves they sweep.”
CHAPTER VI.
THE SIBYL AND THE SHADES.
The Sea-god, at Venus’s intercession for her son, sends Æneas and his crews calm seas and prosperous gales. One victim only the Fates demand; Palinurus, the pilot of Æneas’s ship, gives way to sleep during the quiet watches of the night, slips overboard, and is lost. The poet has clothed the whole story in a transparent mythological allegory, and which must have been intended to be transparent. Sleep is personified; Palinurus resists his first temptations; but the god waves over his eyes a bough steeped in dews of Lethe, the river of forgetfulness, and the unhappy steersman can hold out no longer. The accident happens near the shore of the twin Sirens, of whose seductions Homer has told us in the wanderings of Ulysses:—
“A perilous neighbourhood of yore
And white with mounded bones,
Where the hoarse sea with far-heard roar
Keeps washing o’er the stones.”
Æneas discovers his loss by the unsteady course of the galley, and takes the helm himself, until he brings the little fleet safe into the harbour of Cumæ. The crews disembark, with the joy which these seamen of old always felt when they touched land again, and proceed at once to search for water, cut wood, and light fires:—
“Sage Dædalus—so runs the tale—
From Minos bent to fly,
On feathery pinions dared to sail
Along the untravelled sky;
Flies northward through the polar heights,
Nor stays till he on Cumæ lights.
First landed here, he consecrates
The wings whereon he flew
To Phœbus’ power, and dedicates
A fane of stately view.”
Here Æneas consults the mysterious Sibyl, whose oracular verses are referred to in Virgil’s Pastoral already noticed. She figures under various names in classical story—that which she bears here is Deiphobè. Her dwelling is in a cave in the rock behind the temple, with which it communicates by a hundred doors. Within sits the prophetess on a tripod, where she receives the inspiration of the god. When the oracle is pronounced, the doors all fly open, and the sound comes forth. But there is one way in which she is wont to give her answers, against which Helenus has already warned her present visitors. She has a habit of jotting down her responses in verse upon the leaves of trees—each verse apparently on a separate leaf—and then piling them one upon another in her cave. When the doors fly open, the gust of wind whirls the leaves here and there in all directions; and the ambiguities which are proper to all oracles are considerably increased in the process of rearranging the several leaves into anything like coherent order—the Sibyl herself disdaining all further interference. So that many of her clients go away without having received any intelligible answer at all, and from that time forth “hate the very name of the Sibyl.” A modern writer,[32] whose poetical taste has made him one of the most interesting critics of Virgil, has thought that the confusion of the prophetic leaves was meant to symbolise the idea that the will of the gods was made known to mortals only in disjointed utterances, and under no regular law of order. Æneas, therefore, in his appeal to the prophetess, begs her specially to give her answer by word of mouth.
Deiphobè proceeds to the seat of augury, and goes through the terrible struggle which, according to all legends, invariably accompanied this form of prophecy. Even when she comes in view of the awful doors, the influence begins:—
“Her visage pales its hue,
Her locks dishevelled fly,
Her breath comes thick, her wild heart glows;
Dilating as the madness grows,
Her form looks larger to the eye,
Unearthly peals her deep-toned cry,
As breathing nearer and more near
The God comes rushing on his seer.”