“Along the illimitable shade
Darkling and lone their way they made,
Through the vast kingdom of the dead,
An empty void, though tenanted.
So travellers in a forest move
With but the uncertain moon above,
Beneath her niggard light,
When Jupiter has hid from view
The heaven, and Nature’s every hue
Is lost in blinding night.
“At Orcus’ portals hold their lair
Wild Sorrow and avenging Care;
And pale Diseases cluster there,
And pleasureless Decay,
Foul Penury, and Fears that kill,
And Hunger, counsellor of ill,
A ghastly presence they:
Suffering and Death the threshold keep,
And with them Death’s blood-brother Sleep:
Ill Joys with their seducing spells
And deadly War are at the door;
The Furies couch in iron cells,
And Discord maddens and rebels;
Her snake-locks hiss, her wreaths drip gore.
“Full in the midst an aged elm
Broods darkly o’er the shadowy realm:
There dream-land phantoms rest the wing,
Men say, and ’neath its foliage cling.
And many monstrous shapes beside
Within the infernal gates abide;
There Centaurs, Scyllas, fish and maid,
There Briareus’ hundred-handed shade,
Chimæra armed with flame,
Gorgons and Harpies make their den,
With the foul pest of Lerna’s fen,
And Geryon’s triple frame.”
Then they come in sight of the rivers of Hell—Acheron, Cocytus, and Styx. The relative physical geography is somewhat confused by the poet, but it is the Styx on which the Ferryman of the Shades, the surly Charon,—
“Grim, squalid, foul, with aspect dire,
His eyeballs each a globe of fire,”—
plies his office of transporting the dead, performing the duties which Homer assigns to Mercury. But it is not all who even in death are allowed to pass the gloomy river. Only those who have received all due rites of burial can claim to enter the final abode of spirits at once; those unhappy ones who from any cause lie unburied have to wander, moaning and shivering, on the other side, for a space of a hundred years. So the Sibyl explains to Æneas, when he marks with surprise how the shades all crowd eagerly to the boat-side praying for admission, and how the grisly ferryman drives some back with his oar. It is a sad thought to the hero; for amongst the rejected he sees some of his own companions who had perished in the storm off the coast of Carthage. Among them, too, he sees the figure of his late pilot Palinurus, who tells him the story of his unhappy fate; how, after all, he was not drowned, but, clinging to the piece of rudder which had broken away with him, had drifted three days and nights upon the waves, and had at last swam ashore on the fated coast of Italy. There the cruel natives had attacked and killed him, as he struggled up the cliffs; and now his corpse lies tossed to and fro amid the breakers in the harbour of Velia. He prays of his leader either to sail back there and to
“Give him a little earth for charity;”
or, by his influence with these Powers below, to get the law of exclusion relaxed in his favour. This last request the Sibyl rebukes at once, as utterly inorthodox and heretical; but comforts him at the same time with the assurance that the barbarous natives shall be plagued by heaven for their abominable deed, nor shall they find deliverance until they solemnly propitiate his shade by the erection of a mound and the establishment of funeral honours, and call the spot by the name of Palinurus—which name, the Sibyl declares, shall endure there for ever. The oracular voice in this case was not deceitful: the place, or supposed place, is still called “Punta di Palinuro.” Virgil’s imperial audience might know it well, for Augustus was very nearly himself becoming a sacrifice on that very spot to the manes of the ancient pilot, many of his ships having been cast away on that very headland.
Charon is by no means gracious to the intruders. At first he warns them off. He has no pleasant recollections of former visitors from upper air, who, without the proper qualification of being previously dead and duly burnt or buried, had made their way against all rule into this abode of shadows. Hercules had come there, and carried off their watchful guardian Cerberus: Theseus and his friend Pirithous had even tried to do the same by Proserpine.
“My laws forbid me to convey
Substantial forms of breathing clay.
’Twas no good hour that made me take
Alcides o’er the nether lake,
Nor found I more auspicious freight
In Theseus and his daring mate;
Yet all were Heaven’s undoubted heirs,
And prowess more than man’s was theirs.
That from our monarch’s footstool dragged
The infernal watch-dog, bound and gagged;
These strove to force from Pluto’s side
Our mistress, his imperial bride.”