All this crowd thou
discernest
is helpless and unsepultured;
Charon is the ferryman; they who ride on the wave found a tomb.
Charon is the ferryman; they who ride on the wave found a tomb.
Virgil - Aeneid
Right in front of the doorway and in the entry of the jaws of
hell Grief and avenging Cares have made their bed; there dwell wan
Sicknesses and gloomy Eld, and Fear, and ill-counselling Hunger, and
loathly Want, shapes terrible to see; and Death and Travail, and thereby
Sleep, Death's kinsman, and the Soul's guilty Joys, and death-dealing
War full in the gateway, and the Furies in their iron cells, and mad
Discord with bloodstained fillets enwreathing her serpent locks.
Midway an elm, shadowy and high, spreads her boughs and secular arms,
where, one saith, idle Dreams dwell clustering, and cling under every
leaf. And monstrous creatures besides, many and diverse, keep covert at
the gates, Centaurs and twy-shaped Scyllas, and the hundredfold
Briareus, and the beast of Lerna hissing horribly, and the Chimaera
armed with flame, Gorgons and Harpies, and the body of the triform
shade. Here Aeneas snatches at his sword in a sudden flutter of terror,
and turns the naked edge on them as they come; and did not his wise
fellow-passenger remind him that these lives flit thin and unessential
in the hollow mask of body, he would rush on and vainly lash through
phantoms with his steel.
Hence a road leads to Tartarus and Acheron's wave. Here the dreary pool
swirls thick in muddy eddies and disgorges into Cocytus with its load of
sand. Charon, the dread ferryman, guards these flowing streams, ragged
and awful, his chin covered with untrimmed masses of hoary hair, and his
glassy eyes aflame; his soiled raiment hangs knotted from his shoulders.
Himself he plies the pole and trims the sails of his vessel, the
steel-blue galley with freight [304-336]of dead; stricken now in years,
but a god's old age is lusty and green. Hither all crowded, and rushed
streaming to the bank, matrons and men and high-hearted heroes dead and
done with life, boys and unwedded girls, and children laid young on the
bier before their parents' eyes, multitudinous as leaves fall dropping
in the forests at autumn's earliest frost, or birds swarm landward from
the deep gulf, when the chill of the year routs them overseas and drives
them to sunny lands. They stood pleading for the first passage across,
and stretched forth passionate hands to the farther shore. But the grim
sailor admits now one and now another, while some he pushes back far
apart on the strand. Moved with marvel at the confused throng: 'Say, O
maiden,' cries Aeneas, 'what means this flocking to the river? of what
are the souls so fain? or what difference makes these retire from the
banks, those go with sweeping oars over the leaden waterways? '
To him the long-lived priestess thus briefly returned: 'Seed of
Anchises, most sure progeny of gods, thou seest the deep pools of
Cocytus and the Stygian marsh, by whose divinity the gods fear to swear
falsely.
All this crowd thou discernest is helpless and unsepultured;
Charon is the ferryman; they who ride on the wave found a tomb. Nor is
it given to cross the awful banks and hoarse streams ere the dust hath
found a resting-place. An hundred years they wander here flitting about
the shore; then at last they gain entrance, and revisit the pools so
sorely desired. '
Anchises' son stood still, and ponderingly stayed his footsteps, pitying
at heart their cruel lot. There he discerns, mournful and unhonoured
dead, Leucaspis and Orontes, captains of the Lycian squadron, whom, as
they sailed together from Troy over gusty seas, the south wind
overwhelmed and wrapped the waters round ship and men.
[337-369]Lo, there went by Palinurus the steersman, who of late, while
he watched the stars on their Libyan passage, had slipped from the stern
and fallen amid the waves. To him, when he first knew the melancholy
form in that depth of shade, he thus opens speech: 'What god, O
Palinurus, reft thee from us and sank thee amid the seas? forth and
tell. For in this single answer Apollo deceived me, never found false
before, when he prophesied thee safety on ocean and arrival on the
Ausonian coasts. See, is this his promise-keeping? '
And he: 'Neither did Phoebus on his oracular seat delude thee, O prince,
Anchises' son, nor did any god drown me in the sea. For while I clung to
my appointed charge and governed our course, I pulled the tiller with me
in my fall, and the shock as I slipped wrenched it away. By the rough
seas I swear, fear for myself never wrung me so sore as for thy ship,
lest, the rudder lost and the pilot struck away, those gathering waves
might master it. Three wintry nights in the water the blustering south
drove me over the endless sea; scarcely on the fourth dawn I descried
Italy as I rose on the climbing wave. Little by little I swam shoreward;
already I clung safe; but while, encumbered with my dripping raiment, I
caught with crooked fingers at the jagged needles of mountain rock, the
barbarous people attacked me in arms and ignorantly deemed me a prize.
Now the wave holds me, and the winds toss me on the shore.
hell Grief and avenging Cares have made their bed; there dwell wan
Sicknesses and gloomy Eld, and Fear, and ill-counselling Hunger, and
loathly Want, shapes terrible to see; and Death and Travail, and thereby
Sleep, Death's kinsman, and the Soul's guilty Joys, and death-dealing
War full in the gateway, and the Furies in their iron cells, and mad
Discord with bloodstained fillets enwreathing her serpent locks.
Midway an elm, shadowy and high, spreads her boughs and secular arms,
where, one saith, idle Dreams dwell clustering, and cling under every
leaf. And monstrous creatures besides, many and diverse, keep covert at
the gates, Centaurs and twy-shaped Scyllas, and the hundredfold
Briareus, and the beast of Lerna hissing horribly, and the Chimaera
armed with flame, Gorgons and Harpies, and the body of the triform
shade. Here Aeneas snatches at his sword in a sudden flutter of terror,
and turns the naked edge on them as they come; and did not his wise
fellow-passenger remind him that these lives flit thin and unessential
in the hollow mask of body, he would rush on and vainly lash through
phantoms with his steel.
Hence a road leads to Tartarus and Acheron's wave. Here the dreary pool
swirls thick in muddy eddies and disgorges into Cocytus with its load of
sand. Charon, the dread ferryman, guards these flowing streams, ragged
and awful, his chin covered with untrimmed masses of hoary hair, and his
glassy eyes aflame; his soiled raiment hangs knotted from his shoulders.
Himself he plies the pole and trims the sails of his vessel, the
steel-blue galley with freight [304-336]of dead; stricken now in years,
but a god's old age is lusty and green. Hither all crowded, and rushed
streaming to the bank, matrons and men and high-hearted heroes dead and
done with life, boys and unwedded girls, and children laid young on the
bier before their parents' eyes, multitudinous as leaves fall dropping
in the forests at autumn's earliest frost, or birds swarm landward from
the deep gulf, when the chill of the year routs them overseas and drives
them to sunny lands. They stood pleading for the first passage across,
and stretched forth passionate hands to the farther shore. But the grim
sailor admits now one and now another, while some he pushes back far
apart on the strand. Moved with marvel at the confused throng: 'Say, O
maiden,' cries Aeneas, 'what means this flocking to the river? of what
are the souls so fain? or what difference makes these retire from the
banks, those go with sweeping oars over the leaden waterways? '
To him the long-lived priestess thus briefly returned: 'Seed of
Anchises, most sure progeny of gods, thou seest the deep pools of
Cocytus and the Stygian marsh, by whose divinity the gods fear to swear
falsely.
All this crowd thou discernest is helpless and unsepultured;
Charon is the ferryman; they who ride on the wave found a tomb. Nor is
it given to cross the awful banks and hoarse streams ere the dust hath
found a resting-place. An hundred years they wander here flitting about
the shore; then at last they gain entrance, and revisit the pools so
sorely desired. '
Anchises' son stood still, and ponderingly stayed his footsteps, pitying
at heart their cruel lot. There he discerns, mournful and unhonoured
dead, Leucaspis and Orontes, captains of the Lycian squadron, whom, as
they sailed together from Troy over gusty seas, the south wind
overwhelmed and wrapped the waters round ship and men.
[337-369]Lo, there went by Palinurus the steersman, who of late, while
he watched the stars on their Libyan passage, had slipped from the stern
and fallen amid the waves. To him, when he first knew the melancholy
form in that depth of shade, he thus opens speech: 'What god, O
Palinurus, reft thee from us and sank thee amid the seas? forth and
tell. For in this single answer Apollo deceived me, never found false
before, when he prophesied thee safety on ocean and arrival on the
Ausonian coasts. See, is this his promise-keeping? '
And he: 'Neither did Phoebus on his oracular seat delude thee, O prince,
Anchises' son, nor did any god drown me in the sea. For while I clung to
my appointed charge and governed our course, I pulled the tiller with me
in my fall, and the shock as I slipped wrenched it away. By the rough
seas I swear, fear for myself never wrung me so sore as for thy ship,
lest, the rudder lost and the pilot struck away, those gathering waves
might master it. Three wintry nights in the water the blustering south
drove me over the endless sea; scarcely on the fourth dawn I descried
Italy as I rose on the climbing wave. Little by little I swam shoreward;
already I clung safe; but while, encumbered with my dripping raiment, I
caught with crooked fingers at the jagged needles of mountain rock, the
barbarous people attacked me in arms and ignorantly deemed me a prize.
Now the wave holds me, and the winds toss me on the shore.
