LIBER SEXTUS

Summary

The celebrity of the Sixth Book of the Aeneid is one of those broad and acknowledged facts before which minute criticism is almost powerless. There is indeed no part of the work which more completely exemplifies the characteristics of Virgil as a poetical artist. He appears not only to reproduce Homer, but to absorb him. Aeneas sees all, or nearly all, that Ulysses sees—his parent, his friends, his enemies, and the heroes and heroines of previous legend: but he sees much more besides. The bare and shadowy outlines of the Homeric are filled in with details unquestionably elaborate and apparently precise. Instead of a place of simply ghostly existence, where suffering and doing seem to be the exceptions, and dreary, objectless being the rule, we have a territory mapped out and sharply divided—a neutral region for those who are unfortunate rather than blameworthy, a barred and bolted prison-house of torture for the bad, a heroic Valhalla for prowess, genius, and worth. All that later Greek religion and philosophy taught by legend, allegory, and symbol is pressed into the service of poetry, and made to contribute to the production of a grand and impressive picture. As a climax to the whole, the Pythagorean doctrine of transmigration is invoked for the purpose of showing Aeneas the vision of the future, as he has already seen the vision of the past.