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.”
The paroxysms increase after she has entered the cave, and is in the
agonies of inspiration:--
“The seer, impatient of control,
Raves in the cavern vast,
And madly struggles from her soul
The incumbent power to cast.
He, mighty Master, plies the more
Her foaming mouth, all chafed and sore,
Tames her wild heart with plastic hand,
And makes her docile to command.”
At last all the hundred doors fly open at once, and the voice of destiny
comes forth. The wanderers shall reach Latium safely, but they shall
wish they had never reached it.
“War, dreadful war, and Tiber flood
I see incarnadined with blood;
Simois and Xanthus, and the plain
Where Greece encamped shall rise again;
A new Achilles, goddess-born,
The destinies provide,
And Juno, like a rankling thorn,
Shall never quit your side.
* * * * *
The old, old cause shall stir the strife--
A stranger bed, a foreign wife.
Yet still despond not, but proceed
Along the path where Fate may lead.”
Æneas hears,--undismayed. He is a true hero so far, that he is always
equal to his fate. One request he makes of the Sibyl,--that he may visit
the shades below, the entrance to which is said to lie here, within the
prophetess’s domain, and there see again the face of his father.
Deiphobè consents, but not without the solemn warning, often quoted to
point a far higher moral than the heathen poet was likely to have
conceived--so often, that the Latin words themselves are probably
familiar even to those who profess but little Latin scholarship:---
“Facilis descensus Averni;
Noctes atque dies patet atra janua Ditis;
Sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras,
Hoc opus, hic labor est.”
Their terseness and pathos are not easy to reproduce in any other
language, but Mr Conington has done it as well, perhaps, as it could be
done:--
“The journey down to the Abyss
Is prosperous and light;
The palace-gates of gloomy Dis
Stand open day and night;
But upward to retrace the way,
And pass into the light of day,--
There comes the stress of labour--this
May task a hero’s might.”
Few are they of mortal birth who, by the special grace of the gods, have
achieved that desperate venture with success. Still, if Æneas is
determined to attempt it, she will teach him the secret of the passage.
Deep in the shades of the neighbouring forest there grows a tree which
bears a golden bough, which he must find and carry with him into the
regions of the dead; it is the gift which Proserpine, who reigns there,
claims from all who enter her court.
Accompanied by his faithful Achates, Æneas enters the woods in quest of
the golden bough. The search seems in vain, until two white doves, the
birds of his goddess-mother Venus, make their appearance, and, leading
the way by short successive flights, draw the seekers on to the wondrous
tree, on which they at last alight. The hero makes prize of the golden
branch, with which he returns to the Sibyl. Under her directions he
offers the due sacrifices to the infernal powers--four black bulls, a
barren heifer, and a black ewe-lamb--and then, still under the leading
of the prophetess, with drawn sword in his hand, he enters the mouth of
Hades.
“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.”
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:--
“In front a portal stands displayed,
On adamantine columns stayed;
Nor mortal nor immortal foe
Those massy gates could overthrow.
An iron tower of equal might
In air uprises steep;
Tisiphonè, in red robes dight,
Sits on the threshold day and night,
With eyes that know not sleep.
Hark! from within there issue groans,
The cracking of the thong,
The clank of iron o’er the stones
Dragged heavily along.”
Æneas asks of his companion the meaning of these fearful sounds. They
are the outcries of the wicked in torment. They may not be seen by human
eyes; but Deiphobè herself has been shown all the horrible secrets of
their prison-house by Hecate, when intrusted by that goddess with the
charge of the entrance to the Shades. She tells Æneas how Rhadamanthus
sits in judgment there, and forces the wicked to confess their deeds.
Crimes successfully concealed on earth are there made manifest; then the
culprit is handed over to the Furies for punishment. Such punishments
are various as the crimes; strange and horrible in the cases of
extraordinary offenders,--especially against the majesty of the gods. In
the lowest gulf of all,--
“Where Tartarus, with sheer descent,
Dips ’neath the ghost-world twice as deep
As towers above earth’s continent
The height of heaven’s Olympian steep,”--
lie the twin giants, sons of Aloeus, who sought to storm heaven, and
hurl Jupiter from his throne. There, too, is chained Salmoneus, who,
counterfeiting the thunder and lightning of the Olympian ruler, was
struck down by the force which he profanely imitated. Tityos, son of
Earth, who dared to offer violence to the goddess Latona, lies there
also, suffering the punishment assigned by the Greek mythologists to
Prometheus:--
“O’er acres nine from end to end
His vast unmeasured limbs extend;
A vulture on his liver preys:
The liver fails not, nor decays:
Still o’er that flesh which breeds new pangs,
With crooked beak the torturer hangs,
Explores its depth with bloody fangs,
And searches for her food;
Still haunts the cavern of his breast,
Nor lets the filaments have rest,
To endless pain renewed.”
Virgil is here more literally orthodox, and less philosophical in his
creed, than his master Lucretius. For he, too, knew the story of Tityos,
but saw in it only an allegory; “every man is a Tityos,” says the elder
poet, “whose heart is torn and racked perpetually by his own evil lusts
and passions.” Other and various torments has the Sibyl seen; for the
selfish and covetous, for the adulterer, for the betrayer of trust, and
the spoiler of the orphan; the feast ever spread before the hungry eyes
and ever vanishing; the rock overhanging the head of the guilty, ever
ready to fall; the stone that has to be rolled with vast labour up the
hill, only to roll back again for ever; and, most remarkable of all
punishments, the doom of the restless adventurer Theseus for his attempt
on Proserpine--to sit for ever in perpetual inactivity. And amidst them
all rings out the warning voice of Phlegyas (condemned for having set
fire to the temple of Apollo) from his place of torment:--
“Be warned--learn righteousness--and reverence heaven.”
Here again we have, it may be, a protest against the teaching of
Lucretius: a distinct rejection, on Virgil’s part, of the materialistic
doctrine which would deny a divine Providence and human responsibility.
The whole conception of Virgil’s hell is grand and terrific. Highly
material and sensational, it is hardly more so than mediæval divines and
artists have represented; and indeed it is more than probable that,
consciously or unconsciously, they often adopted pagan notions on the
subject. In its moral teaching, whether the poet intended his
descriptions to be taken in their literal sense or interpreted in the
way of parable, his creed has at least the essential elements of truth.
But now the visitors turn their steps towards the Elysian fields, and
after duly hanging up the golden bough at the gate for Proserpine’s
acceptance, they enter those abodes of the blest:--
“Green spaces, folded in with trees,
A paradise of pleasaunces;
Around the champaign mantles bright
The fulness of purpureal light;
Another sun and stars they know,
That shine like ours, but shine below.”
There are assembled the illustrious dead--warriors who have died for
their country; priests of unstained life; bards who have never perverted
their powers; all who have been benefactors of mankind,--
“A goodly brotherhood, bedight
With coronals of virgin white.”
Shadows as they are, all the items of their happiness are material. The
games of the palæstra, the song of the bard, the care of ghostly horses
and ghostly chariots, form the interests of this world of spirits;--the
interests of earth, without earth’s substantial realities. The poet
found his imagination fail him, as it fails us all, when he tries to
paint the details of an incorporeal existence.
Among these happy spirits the hero finds his father Anchises. He
recognises and addresses him. Anchises had expected the visit, and
receives him with such tears of joy as spirits may shed. But when Æneas
strives to embrace him, the conditions of this spiritual world forbid
it:--
“Thrice strove the son his sire to clasp;
Thrice the vain phantom mocked his grasp:
No vision of the drowsy night,
No airy current, half so light.”
The occupation of Anchises in these regions is much more philosophical
than that which is assigned to the other shades. He is contemplating the
unborn rulers of the Rome that is to be; the spirits, as yet
incorporeal, which are soon to receive a new body, and so go forth into
upper air. Deep in a forest lies the river Lethe, and a countless
multitude of forms are seen thronging its banks, to drink of the water
of forgetfulness. Oblivious of all their past lives, they will thus take
their place once more, in changed bodies, among the inhabitants of
earth. The poet’s adaptation of the Pythagorean doctrine of
transmigration is none of the clearest; but he signifies that, after the
lapse of a thousand years in a kind of Purgatory below, these spirits
are again summoned to play their part, in new bodies, upon earth.
Anchises can read their destinies; and he points out to his son the
shadowy forms, like the kings in ‘Macbeth,’ that are to be the kings and
consuls of the great Roman, nation. First, those who shall reign in
Alba--Silvius, that shall be born to Æneas in his new home, Capys, and
Numitor; young Romulus, son of the war-god (he wears already the
two-crested helmet in right of his birth), who shall transplant the
sceptre to the seven-hilled city, and the kings that shall succeed him
there. He shows him, too, those who shall make the future great names of
the Republic--Brutus, the Decii, Camillus, Fabius, and the Scipios. But
the centre of the picture is reserved for one great house:--
“Turn hither now your ranging eye:
Behold a glorious family,
Your sons and sons of Rome:
Lo! Cæsar there and all his seed,
lulus’ progeny, decreed
To pass ’neath heaven’s high dome.
This, this is he, so oft the theme
Of your prophetic fancy’s dream,
Augustus Cæsar, god by birth;
Restorer of the age of gold
In lands where Saturn ruled of old:
O’er Ind and Garamant extreme
Shall stretch his reign, that spans the earth.
Look to that land which lies afar
Beyond the path of sun or star,
Where Atlas on his shoulder rears
The burden of the incumbent spheres.
Egypt e’en now and Caspia hear
The muttered voice of many a seer,
And Nile’s seven mouths, disturbed with fear,
Their coming conqueror know.”
The future glories of Rome are described in a grand and well-known
passage, to the majestic rhythm of which no English translator seems
able to do full justice. The poet contrasts the warlike genius of his
countrymen with the softer accomplishments of their rivals:--
“Others with softer hand may mould the brass,
Or wake to warmer life the marble mass;
Plead at the bar with more prevailing force,
Or trace more justly heaven’s revolving course:
Roman! be thine the sovereign arts of sway,
To ride, and make the subject world obey;
Give peace its laws; respect the prostrate foe;
Abase the lofty, and exalt the low.”
--SYMMONS.[36]
One personal sketch the poet’s art had reserved to the last. Anchises
points out to his visitor the shade that is to be the great Marcus
Marcellus, five times consul--the “Sword of Rome,” as Fabius was said to
be its Shield, in the long wars with Carthage, and the conqueror of
Syracuse. By his side moves the figure of an armed youth, tall and
beautiful, but whose face is sad, and his eyes fixed on the ground. The
company of shadows crowd round him, murmuring their admiration. Who is
it? Æneas asks. It is the young Marcellus of the Empire, the hope and
promise of Rome--the son of Octavia, sister of Augustus, and destined,
as many thought, to be his successor. Unwillingly Anchises replies to
his son’s question:--
“Ah son! compel me not to speak
The sorrows of our race!
That youth the Fates but just display
To earth, nor let him longer stay:
With gifts like these for aye to hold,
Rome’s heart had e’en been overbold.
Ah! what a groan from Mars’s plain
Shall o’er the city sound!
How wilt thou gaze on that long train,
Old Tiber, rolling to the main
Beside his new-raised mound!
No youth of Ilium’s seed inspires
With hope as fair his Latian sires:
Nor Rome shall dandle on her knee
A nursling so adored as he.
O piety! O ancient faith!
O hand untamed in battle scathe!
No foe had lived before his sword,
Stemmed he on foot the war’s red tide
Or with relentless rowel gored
His foaming charger’s side.
Dear child of pity! shouldst thou burst
The dungeon-bars of Fate accurst,
Our own Marcellus thou!
Bring lilies here, in handfuls bring:
Their lustrous blooms I fain would fling:
Such honour to a grandson’s shade
By grandsire hands may well be paid:
Yet O! it ’vails not now!”
He had died not long before, in his twentieth year, intensely lamented
both by his family and the people.
The recital of the passage by the poet before his imperial audience had
a more striking effect than even he himself could have expected. Octavia
swooned away, and had to be removed by her attendants,--sending,
however, magnificent presents afterwards to the poet for his eulogy on
her dead son.[37]
The biographers add, that Augustus commanded Virgil to read no further
on that day, and that the poet replied he had already ended the subject.
He has not much more to say in this Sixth Book. Anchises gives his son
some prophetic intimations as to his future fortunes in Italy, and then
escorts his visitors to the gates of Sleep.
“Sleep gives his name to portals twain:
One all of horn, they say,
Through which authentic spectres gain
Quick exit into day,
And one which bright with ivory gleams,
Whence Pluto sends delusive dreams.
Conversing still, the sire attends
The travellers on their road,
And through the ivory portal sends
From forth the unseen abode.”
The lines have been taken to mean that this visit to the shades was,
after all, but a dream.