Excerpt from Pagan Ideas of Immortality During the Early Roman Empire
Ture for our considerations. In this book, as you will remember, the poet's hero, having reached Italian soil at last, is led down to the lower world by the Cumaean Sybil. This descent to Hades belongs historically to that long series of apoc alyptic writings which begins with the eleventh book of the Odyssey and closes with Dante's Divine Comedy. Warde Fowler deserves credit for clearly point ing out that this visit of Aeneas to the world below 18 the final ordeal for him, a mystic initiation, in which he receives enlightenment for the toil, peril, and triumph that await him in the accomplishment of his divine mis sion. When the Tro J an hero has learned from his father's shade the mysteries of life and death, and has been taught the magnitude of the work which lies before him, and the great things that are to be, he casts off the timidity which he has hitherto shown and, strengthened.
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