On this week’s episode we discuss Aeneas’ trip to the Dis, the underworld of Roman mythology. There seems to be something a bit obligatory about this trip. Like hosting funeral games, burying fallen warriors, and battling enemy champions, traveling to the underworld is just something epic heroes do in their poems. We consider again in what ways Aeneas is and is not like other epic heroes. Like his trip to the underworld, his position at the center of Vergil’s epic feels a bit obligatory. He does not stand apart from the crowd in the manner of Achilles. Aeneas is imitable, in ways that Odysseus and Achilles are not. Is this of the nature of his heroism?

While in Dis, Aeneas and his father Anchises discuss the future, which leads Anchises to offer another long prophecy of Roman greatness and Roman triumph, culminating in world-dominion under Augustus. However, some strange details cause us to consider to just what degree Vergil intends this prophecy to be taken as an absolute and final pronouncement. For instance, it is possible to construe Apollo’s prophecy that all Aeneas’ soldiers will reach Italy safely as false (Palinurus, seduced by the god Sleep, falls overboard). Even more strangely, when Aeneas returns to the Earth, he exits the underworld not by the gate of true dreams, but through the gate of false dreams. Very odd indeed. What might these textual mysteries say about Vergil’s relationship to the glory of Rome and Augustus, a glory which his poem is meant to celebrate?