were destined to spring from the Trojan stock and, unless the course of fate could be changed, to overthrow Carthage, which she loved and protected. Therefore she persuaded Aeolus, the keeper of the winds, to let them loose on the ships of Aeneas; and though Neptune stayed the storm before it was too late, they were scattered and driven out of their course and upon the shores of Africa. Here the Trojans came to the Phoenician town of Carthage, already growing up under the sovereignty of Dido, who had fled from Tyre after the murder of her husband Sychaeus by Pygmalion, her brother, and had established herself in this new home. She received the strangers with generous hospitality, offering to give them a share in her city or to send them away in safety. Venus, however, fearful for Aeneas, her son, and distrusting Carthaginian friendship, sent Cupid to take the form of Iulus and, while he sat on Dido's knee, to inspire her with love for Aeneas. When the feast, with its music and song, was done, Aeneas told the story of the fall of Troy and of his long wanderings.

Time passed, and Aeneas still stayed in Carthage, loved by Dido and, as it seems, returning her love, till Jupiter, being wrathful at his dalliance and failure in his great mission, sent Mercury to bid him be gone. Nor did he dare to disobey, but sailed away as soon as he could, leaving Dido to kill herself in despair. With his followers he came to Sicily, where he celebrated the funeral games of Anchises, and voyaging thence reached the shore of Italy and landed at Cumae.

The sixth book is occupied with the journey of Aeneas to the world below; those that follow tell of his arrival in Latium and betrothal to Lavinia, daughter of king Latinus, and of the war with the Rutuli and Turnus their chieftain, who claimed Lavinia for himself.

THE DESCENT OF AENEAS TO HADES.

Virgil places the entrance to the lower world near Cumae, a Greek colony situated just north of the Bay of Naples. It was one of several sites which the imagination of ancient times had chosen, in Greece or Italy, as appropriate for such a mysterious passage. The small lake of Avernus, with its waters sunk in the crater of an extinct volcano, its steep sides covered with dark woods, the mephitic vapours which really exhaled among them and were supposed to be fatal to birds that flew near, may well have suggested the belief. Close by is another lake, once called palus Acherusia, or 'mere of Acheron', though Virgil, as it seems, makes Lake Avernus the outlet for the waters of the river Acheron that overflowed in Hades.

When Aeneas landed at Cumae he sought at once the cave of the Sibyl, according to the instructions of the prophet Helenus, having with him a band of his companions. On a hill that rises steeply from the shore was a grove sacred to Hecate, surrounding the temple of Apollo, and in the rock behind this temple was the cave from which the Sibyl, his priestess, chanted her oracles. At her bidding Aeneas begins his prayer, asking

that after all his wanderings he may be allowed at last to establish his new home in Latium and find a resting-place for his country's gods. Hearing from the cave, which the Sibyl has now entered, that he will do so, but only after many trials, he makes the further request that he may go down to Hades to see his father. She replies that to gain this permission he must find and pluck the golden bough and carry it with him as a gift to Proserpina (Hecate). With Achates as his companion he searches the wood, and led by the doves of his mother, Venus, he comes to the shore of Lake Avernus, where he sees the bough gleaming through the green leaves of an oak. After bringing it to the Sibyl, he buries with all due rites the body of his trumpeter, Misenus, who had been found dead on the sea-shore, and then returns to the lake. Here is the entrance to the world below, a deep and wide cave, 'sheltered by dark lake and gloomy forest'. Before it he sacrifices black cattle while it is yet night, and waits till at the dawn of day the earth rumbles, the wooded ridges shake, and the baying of the hounds of Hecate is heard through the twilight, heralding the approach of the goddess. Then the Sibyl, bidding all the 'unholy' leave the grove, summons Aeneas to follow her and rushes into the cave.

We are struck by the accessibility of the place. Any wanderer in the forest might have come to the cave and, as far as we can judge by the narrative, proceeded without meeting any physical obstacle to the entrance of the vestibulum, the open fore-court with a gate at its back leading into

Hades. Yet outside this court the terrors of the lower world begin, for there dwell the dread shapes of Grief, Sickness, Want, Death, even the Furies in their iron cells. Perhaps we must suppose that some religious awe guarded the place or that these spectral forms were invisible to profane eyes.

When Aeneas and the Sibyl enter the vestibulum, they see an elm, shadowy and high, which is, as we are told not without significance, the home of 'idle dreams'. Around it they meet ghostly monsters, such as Centaurs, Gorgons, and Harpies, and passing out by the gate they find the path that leads through the land of the unburied dead to the river, over which the ferryman, Charon, takes his boat to and fro. Only those who have received funeral rites may cross at once; the rest must wait for a hundred years, wandering by the stream and 'stretching out their hands in longing for the further shore'. The river seems to be the Cocytus, though with regard to its name Virgil's language is rather puzzling. He speaks of the path that leads to Tartarean Acheron, as if this was the river to be crossed, but immediately afterwards tells us that Acheron flows into Cocytus, and presently he makes the Sybil, pointing to the souls in Charon's boat, say 'You behold the deep pools of Cocytus and the mere of the Styx'. Charon declines to take the bodies of the living in his 'Stygian bark'. Further on in the book we hear that the Styx surrounds the land of the dead with its nine-fold coil. Dante makes Charon's river the Acheron.

The companions, overcoming Charon's objections to the conveyance of 'living bodies' by the display of the golden bough, are ferried across the river and, after putting the watch-dog Cerberus to sleep with a drugged cake, reach the true spiritworld and first enter the neutral land of twilight that stretches to the confines of Tartarus and Elysium. Its inhabitants, in the order given by Virgil, are infants, men and women who have been put to death on a false charge, suicides innocent of crime, those to whom love has brought death (all who are named being women), and, furthest away and shut off from the rest, warriors renowned for their prowess. It is obvious that these souls vary greatly in merit and character, but they are classed together because the lives of all of them have been cut short before they have shown themselves to be worthy of Elysium, though on the other hand they have not deserved to be sent to Tartarus. We must remember that their dwelling-place is not Heaven or Hell, or even Purgatory, but a neutral land reserved for neutral lives.

When we come to consider the five classes separately, we shall not find much difficulty about the first and third. Virgil could hardly have placed the infants elsewhere, and later writers have not always been so merciful, while the suicides may fairly be considered responsible for their own want of opportunity. Our difficulties begin with the second class; we should object that among those who have been put to death unjustly would be found some of the heroes and heroines of