Satanism Today - An Encyclopedia of Religion, Folklore and Popular ...

V
Virgil
Virgil’s Aeneid was the direct inspiration for
Dante’s vision of hell in his celebrated Inferno.
This indebtedness is symbolically reflected in the
Inferno itself, because Virgil serves as Dante’s guide
in his tour of the underworld. The Roman poet
Virgil (70 B.C.–19 B.C.) was born Publius Vergilius
Maro to a humble family in Andes, a village near
Mantua in northern Italy. He attended school at
Cremona and Milan, and then he went to Rome to
study medicine, mathematics, and rhetoric. Later
he moved to Naples, where he studied philosophy
under Siron the Epicurean. Lucretius’s philosophy
of De rerum natura and Catullus’s poetry were the
two major influences on Virgil during his formative
years. His earliest certain work was the
Bucolics or Eclogues, ten pastoral poems modeled
on the Greek pastorals of Theocritus. The
Georgics, his next work, is a didactic poem on
farming describing the country life with which
Virgil was personally familiar and dealing with all
aspects of universal life, as the themes of the four
books on War, Peace, Death, and Rebirth suggest.
Virgil’s last years were devoted to the Aeneid,
left unfinished at his death, telling about the
wanderings of Aeneas after the fall of Troy, similar
to the wanderings of Odysseus, and his final settlement
in Latium. The poem is an epic about the
formation of Roman people and the great role
they played in the history of the world according
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to a divine decree. The agency of fate is predominant
in the poem, even though in some parts of it
a spiritual dispensation is awarded to virtuous
men, according to their actions.
This image is particularly easy to perceive in
the sixth book of the Aeneid, which can be considered
the starting point of Dante’s Inferno. In this
part of the poem, Virgil offers his conception of
individual destiny after life, describing the descent
of Aeneas into Hades, the underworld, escorted by
the Sybil, to reach his father, from whom he will
receive a mystic revelation and a prophecy before
returning to the upper world.
Virgil’s world of the dead is described as a
place below the earth, which can be entered by the
cave near Lake Avernus. It is thus very different
from Homer’s underworld, located in the far
northwest, but still apparently on the earth.
Virgil’s underworld is populated by the shades of
great personages of legend and of the ordinary
men: the righteous souls are allocated to the right
region called Elysium and the sinners are
punished in the left one called Tartarus, while the
souls of those who have died in infancy and of
those who have died a violent death inhabit limbo
and the region next to it.
Anchises, Aeneas’s father, leads his son on to a
third division of the underworld, the banks of
Lethe, where the souls destined to return for
another life to the upper world are gathered. Here