The "line-up" in the Underworld of souls to be "recycled" into great Romans seems to smack of reincarnation. Does this appear in any other Roman writings either literary or religious?
Ennius apparently claimed to have been, in previous lives, both the poet Homer and a peacock. I don't have the Ennius quotes handy, but Horace makes some reference to this in the _Epistulae_.
Ennius, et sapiens et fortis et alter Homerus,
ut critici dicunt, leuiter curare uidetur
quo promissa cadant et somnia Pythagorea.
--Horace Epist. 2.1.50-52David Wilson-Okamura earlier wrote (in part):
I'm not the first person to suggest that Aeneas goes to the underworld in a dream; more than one person has pointed out that the entrance to Hades is guarded by a black elm tree that has "somnia...uana" hanging in its branches (Aen. 6.283-84). What I'm suggesting here is that what Virgil says darkly in book 6 he says more openly at the beginning of book 7. To put it more plainly, the fume-induced vision that Latinus has in Aen. 7.81f is the same kind of experience that Aeneas has in book 6. The difference is that what happens to Aeneas is described allegorically, in mythological terms, and the vision of Latinus is described directly, in what I will call (for lack of a better term) anthropological terms.
Dreams and the underworld have a long-standing association, so I don't think the presence of _somnia vana_ need mark the experience of Aeneas himself as a dream. I'm inclined to agree with DWO's interpretation of the close of Book VI (the "ivory gate" passage)-- that Virgil is winking at the audience, saying "I know this can't happen and so do you, but this is the story I'm telling." For that reason I think DWO's notion that the whole underworld journey is a dream of Aeneas is rather jarringly naturalistic. It seems to imply that there is a "real" Aeneas in the _Aeneid_, apart from the one Vergil is telling us about, and that we can get at what is actually happening to him. I'd rather take the deliberately naive position that what Vergil says is happening to Aeneas is actually happening to him (within the limits of Vergil's fictional world), though of course this doesn't bar the interpretation that Aeneas' journey is an allegory of a nonfictional person's encounter with apparitions which suggest (pleasantly, but falsely, from Vergil's point of view) that there is a life after death.
It might be interesting, though, to look at some other dream passages in the _Aeneid_ (the appearance of Hector in Book 2 for instance), and see if their borders are marked in any way that resembles the trip to the underworld.
JM("Metempsychotic")P
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
To leave the Mantovano mailing list at any time, do NOT hit reply.
Instead, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message
"unsubscribe mantovano" in the body (omitting the quotation marks). You
can also unsubscribe at http://virgil.org/mantovano/mantovano.htm#unsub
