The Sibyl bids Charon have no fears of this kind now—Cerberus and Proserpine are safe from all designs on the part of her companion. This is Æneas of Troy, known for his “piety” as widely as for his deeds of arms. He does but seek an interview with his sire Anchises. But, if Charon be deaf to all such arguments,—she shows the golden bough. The passport is irresistible. Sullenly, and without a word of reply, the dark boatman brings his craft to shore, and bids the freight of ghosts clear the decks and make room for his living passengers. The boat groans, its seams open and let in the water, as the substantial flesh and blood steps on board.[33] So, in the Iliad of Homer, the mortal horses and earthly chariot of Diomed groan and strain under their immortal burden, when Minerva takes her seat beside the champion.
Cerberus, in spite of Hercules, is at home again, and on the watch. His three heads and snake-wreathed neck are lifted in fury at the sight of strangers, and his bark rings through the shades. But the Sibyl has brought with her a medicated cake, which she throws down to him; he eats, and falls at once into a heavy sleep.
Then, led by the Sibyl, the Trojan chief passes through the various regions of the world below. First they hear the cries of those infants who but just knew life in the world above, and then were snatched away from its enjoyment.[34] Next them come those who have been condemned to death by an unjust judgment, and for whom Minos here sits as judge of appeals. In the next region are those unhappy ones—
“Who all for loathing of the day
In madness threw their lives away:
How gladly now in upper air
Contempt and beggary would they bear,
And labour’s sorest pain!
Fate bars the way: around their keep
The slow unlovely waters creep,
And bind with three-fold chain.”
Suicide was no crime in the early pagan creed; but Virgil has to a certain degree adopted the Platonic notion, that to take away one’s own life was to desert the post of duty. It is remarkable how thoroughly he adopts Homer’s view of the incomparable superiority of the life of the upper world to the best possible estate in the land of shadows. We have here again the sad lament of Achilles in the Iliad—that the life of a slave on earth was more to be desired than the colourless existence of the heroes in Elysium.
Passing from these outer circles, the travellers reach the “Mourning Fields,” in which the poet places all the victims of love. If there was any doubt as to his view of the passion—that it was a lower appetite, excusable enough in man, but in a woman either to be reprobated or pitied according to circumstances—it would be set at rest by the characters of those victims with whom he peoples this unlovely region. Grouped together with such devoted wives as Evadne, who, when her husband fell in the Trojan war, slew herself for grief upon his funeral pile, and Laodamia, whose only crime was that by her too urgent prayers she won back her dead Protesilaus to her embrace for a few fleeting moments, and died of joy in his arms,[35] we find the treacherous Eriphyle, who, for the bribe of a golden necklace, persuaded her husband Amphiarus to go to his predestined death in the same war, and even such disgraces to their sex as were Phædra and Pasiphae. In these Mourning Fields Æneas meets one whom he would, it may be conceived, have very gladly avoided. Half veiled in mist, seen dimly like the moon through a cloud, Dido stands before him there: and thus, for the first time, he is made certain of her death. Æneas is ready with regrets, and even tears.
“She on the ground averted kept
Hard eyes that neither smiled nor wept;
Nor bated more of her stern mood,
Than if a monument she stood.”
At last, without a word, she turns from her false lover, and seeks in the dim groves the society of her dead husband Sichæus.
The Sibyl leads her companion on to the Field of the Heroes. There he sees the mighty men of old: the chiefs who fought against Thebes in the great siege which preceded that of Troy—Tydeus, and Adrastus, and Parthenopæus. There, too, are the shades of his own companions in arms, who fell in defence of their city. Among these last is one who has another tale to tell of the abominable Helen. It is Deiphobus, one of the many sons of Priam, to whom Helen had been given after the death of Paris. Æneas is shocked to see the unsubstantial shape of the prince bearing the marks of barbarous mutilation; his hands lopped, his face gashed, and his ears and nostrils cut off. (For, even in this shadowy existence, the ghosts all bear the marks of violent death—Dido’s self-inflicted wound being specially mentioned.) Æneas asks the history of this terrible disfigurement, and Deiphobus tells it at some length: how the double traitoress, who was then his wife, had led Menelaus and his companion, the accursed Ulysses, to the chamber where he lay sunk in sleep on the disastrous night of the city’s capture, and how they two had thus mangled his body.
But the Sibyl warns her companion, who stands absorbed in grief at his comrade’s fate, that the permitted hours of their visit are fast passing away. She guides him on to where the path they are treading divides, leading in one direction to the Elysian Fields, in the other to Tartarus,—for the district which they have explored already is represented as of an entirely neutral character. On the left, Æneas sees rise before him the broad bastions of Tartarus, round which flows the fiery stream of Phlegethon:—