# Virgil (Collins)/Aeneid 6

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, 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. 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. 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, 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, Iulus' 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 rule, and make the subject world obey; ​Give peace its laws; respect the prostrate foe; Abase the lofty, and exalt the low."
—Symmons.
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.
​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.
* ↑ Keble.
* ↑ The rickety state of Charon's boat was always a fertile source of wit to the freethinkers among the classical satirists. Lucian, in one of his very amusing dialogues, makes Charon complain of his passengers bringing luggage with them: "My boat is something rotten, look you, and lets in a good deal of water at the seams; if you come on board with all that luggage you may repent it—especially those of you who can't swim."—(Dial. Mort., x.) So in another dialogue Menippus thinks it hard to be asked to pay for his passage over, when "he helped to bale the boat all the way." It may be observed that the boat is said to be made of hide, stretched on a wooden frame, like the "coracles" of the Britons, still in use on some of the Welsh rivers. There may be some connection with an ancient tradition which would identify the "white rock" of which Homer speaks (Od., xxiv. 11) as marking the entrance to the regions of the dead with the cliffs of our own island—"Albion." A curious old legend of the coast of France gives some colour to the interpretation. There was a tribe of fishermen who were exempted from payment of tribute, on the ground that they ferried over into Britain the souls of the departed. At nightfall, when they were asleep (so the legend ran), they would be awakened by a loud knocking at their doors, and voices calling them, and feel a strange compulsion to go down to the seashore. There they found boats, not their own, ready launched, and to all appearance empty. When they stepped on board and began to ply their oars they found the boats move as though they were heavily laden, sinking within a finger's breadth of the water's edge; but they saw no man. Within an hour, as it seemed, they reached the opposite coast—a voyage which in their own boats they hardly made in a whole day and night. When they touched the shore of Britain still they saw no shape, but they heard voices welcoming their ghostly passengers, and calling each of the dead by name and rank. Then having got rid, as it seemed, of their invisible freight, they put off again for home, feeling their boats so sensibly lightened that hardly more than the keel touched the water.—See Gesner's Notes on Claudian, iii. 123; Procopius, De Bell. Goth., iv. 20.
* ↑ We have here the foundation of the fanciful doctrine of a Limbo Infantum, held by some doctors of the Romish Church—a kind of vestibule to the greater Purgatory, in which were placed the souls of such children as died before they were old enough to be admitted to the sacraments.
* ↑ "Aloud she shrieked! for Hermes reappears; Round the dear shade she would have clung—'tis vain, The hours are past—too brief, had they been years; And him no mortal effort can detain: Swift, toward the realms that know not earthly day, He through the portal takes his silent way, And on the palace-floor a lifeless corse she lay. "By no weak pity might the gods be moved; She who thus perished, not without the crime Of lovers that in Reason's spite have loved, Was doomed to wear out her appointed time, Apart from happy ghosts that gather flowers Of blissful quiet 'mid unfading bowers." —Wordsworth's 'Laodamia.
* ↑ But none of the recognised translations seem to come so near the spirit of the original as Lord Macaulay's paraphrase—for of course it is only a paraphrase—in his lay of "The Prophecy of Capys:"— "Leave to the sons of Carthage The rudder and the oar; Leave to the Greek his marble nymphs And scrolls of wordy lore: Thine, Roman, is the pilum; Roman, the sword is thine; The even trench, the bristling mound, The legion's ordered line."
* ↑ Virgil is said to have received from her what would amount, in our money, to above £2000—"a round sum," remarks Dryden, with something like professional envy, "for twenty-seven verses."