A Favorite Passage in Vergil's Aeneid
Aeneas sees a crowd of souls hoping to enter Hades.
It was senior year of high school, just a few days before commencement.
My alma mater required seniors to get a passing grade on an oral exam in order to graduate. The oral exam was a kind of verbal quiz, where a panel of three judges (for lack of a better word) would take turns asking you questions.
As you can imagine, it was quite a nerve-wracking endeavor.
We were divided up based on which language we studied. Everyone had taken Latin their freshman and sophomore year, but could choose between Latin, Spanish and German for their junior and senior year of high school. So those were the three groups — Latin, Spanish, and German — each assigned to a classroom or conference room somewhere in the building. Each language’s panel was headed by the teacher of the given language.
Regardless of which language you studied, the general process was the same: There’d be a book sitting on the podium. When your name was pulled out of the jar, you’d walk up to the podium and open the book to the page-number the judges told you. You would then translate and/or interpret a few sentences and answer a variety of questions from the panel.
For us Latinists, the textbook on the podium was a “purple Vergil” — a volume containing the first half of Vergil’s Aeneid, with vocab and footnotes on each page, compiled by a scholar with the last name Pharr. It had been our main textbook in Latin class for a semester and a half at that point, maybe longer.
Students of Spanish, meanwhile, took a look at Don Quixote by Cervantes. I believe the German students’ oral exam involved passages from Goethe’s Faust.
The German orals were conducted partly or entirely in German, and the Spanish orals were done partly or entirely in Spanish. But the Latin orals were almost entirely in English.
There were only about a dozen of us who stuck with Latin as our language of choice for all four years. Our names were called one at a time, selected at random (as noted above). I believe my name was somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Once I reached the podium, nervous as can be, they instructed me to turn to page 327. They then asked me to read aloud a few lines of the Latin. I attempted to read the lines in meter — i.e., in a rhythmic way reflecting the rhythm of the poetry. I read aloud the following:
Huc omnis turba ad ripas effusa ruebat,
matres atque viri, defunctaque corpora vita 305
magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum:
quam multa in silvis autumni frigore primo
lapsa cadunt folia, aut ad terram gurgite ab alto
quam multae glomerantur aves, ubi frigidus annus 310
trans pontum fugat, et terris immittit apricis.
Stabant orantes primi transmittere cursum,
tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore.
The priest on the panel — a monsignor, as I recall — seemed impressed by my attempt to read it in meter.
I was then instructed to translate the passage I had just read aloud. I don’t recall precisely how I translated it in that moment, but here’s what a decent and fairly literal translation might look like:
Here the whole scattered crowd rushed toward the river-banks, mothers and husbands; and the life-deprived bodies of magnanimous heroes; boys and unmarried girls; young men placed on funeral pyres before the faces of their parents. In such great number do fallen leaves die in the forests at autumn’s first frost, or so many birds migrate toward land from a deep whirlpool, when the frigid year chases them across the sea, and sends them inland to sunny lands. They were standing praying to be the first to cross the course, and were clenching their hands with desire for the opposite shore.
This is describing a crowd of dead souls waiting, on the bank of the river Styx, for their turn to make it into the underworld — Hades, as the Romans called it.
It’s from Book Six of The Aeneid. Book Six is about Aeneas’ journey through the underworld. The souls he sees here are probably mostly the souls of the recently deceased, all waiting for their chance to cross over to the other side, as they say.
Though it’s not stated in the Latin passage above, it’s worth explaining that the way they cross the River Styx is by talking to Charon the ferryman, getting on his boat, and giving him two coins to pay for the journey.
A proper funeral in those days often involved putting coins on the eyes of the deceased, or slipping a pair of coins into the funerary urn. Those who did not receive a proper burial had to wait 100 years before finally being allowed to pass over to Hades.
Vergil says the crowd of souls included men and women, boys and girls. He then says the souls are as numerous as the leaves that fall and die in autumn, or big flocks of migrating birds.
His choice of analogies here is somehow very fitting. He’s talking about dead souls, and draws a comparison to dead leaves. He’s talking about souls leaving the land of the living and leaving their cold bodies behind, and draws a comparison to birds leaving the coastlands as storms and cold weather ensue.
The leaves dying is obviously something that happens in autumn. He says the birds migrate away from the sea (presumably the Mediterranean) when the weather gets cold. So I guess these are both metaphors involving the season of fall.
I suspect there is something deep in the human psyche that associates autumn with death. The dying of the leaves, the shift from warmth and vitality to cold, dry air and fewer critters running about — all of it seems analogous to the death of the human person, a metaphor writ large to nearly all of creation.
That would explain why, of all the comparisons Vergil could have used, he chose images associated with autumn and the changing of the seasons.
Or perhaps that’s reading too much into it. What do you think?
Let’s go back to that day near the end of high school.
The panelists asked me a lot about the basics of Greco-Roman mythology regarding the afterlife. What’s the River Styx, who’s Charon, why do people put coins on the eyelids of the departed in some cultures, things like that. Nothing too esoteric, honestly.
After oral exams were over, I recall there being a time of nervous anticipation for our grades to be posted. They were posted on a long sheet, with a simple letter grade by each student’s name. I received an acceptable grade on the oral exam (I think it was a “B” but I don’t recall exactly), and so was able to graduate as normal. I’m not sure what the fate was for those who failed their oral exam — if I recall correctly, everyone in my grade level got a passing grade.
Because of the memories associated with this passage, it has remained a favorite one to revisit.
The poetry of it is quite rich, of course — I’d expect nothing less from Vergil.
By the way, sometimes you’ll see his name spelled “Virgil” instead of “Vergil.”
There’s some interesting history on why there are two different spellings, but I think that’s another issue for another day.