Avernus- Roman LocationLocation · Landmark"Gateway to the Underworld"

The Birdless Lake

Lake Avernus lies in a volcanic crater near Cumae in Campania, a dark, still body of water ringed by steep wooded slopes. Sulfurous gases rose from the earth around it. Lucretius, in De Rerum Natura, attributed the bird deaths to noxious exhalations from the volcanic ground, but the effect was the same: nothing flew over that water and lived. The Greeks named it Aornos. Birdless.

Virgil describes the forests on the crater's slopes as sacred to the gods below, dark enough to make twilight at midday. No woodcutter harvested those trees. No shepherd drove flocks through their shadows. The lake's surface lay still and black, and the air above it stank of sulfur.

The Oracle of the Dead

The historian Ephorus, preserved by Strabo, reported that the Cimmerians lived near Avernus in underground dwellings connected by tunnels. They never saw sunlight. They made their living by operating a nekuomanteion, an oracle of the dead: visitors underwent purification, descended into underground chambers, and through the Cimmerians' guidance received speech from the departed. Homer had placed these people at the edge of the world, in perpetual mist and darkness. Strabo says the oracle eventually failed after a client felt cheated and the priests were exposed, but the association between Avernus and the dead outlasted them.

Aeneas's Descent

In the Aeneid, the Cumaean Sibyl told Aeneas the way down was easy. The door to Dis stands open day and night. The return was another matter; for that he needed the Golden Bough.

Aeneas found the bough in the forest near the lake. It came away in his hand without resistance, which meant the journey was his to make. He sacrificed black cattle to the underworld gods and poured libations of wine and milk into pits dug in the earth. As night fell, the ground groaned, dogs howled in the dark, and the goddess Hecate announced the way was open. The Sibyl cried out for the uninitiated to stand back. They entered the cave.

The Journey Below

Inside, they walked through a darkness as empty as the formless void before creation. At the threshold of the underworld they passed Grief and Disease, Fear and Death, standing in the shadows. Then the great elm where false dreams clustered beneath every leaf like bats. Then the monsters of the borderlands: Centaurs and Gorgons, Scylla and the hundred-armed Briareus. Aeneas drew his sword. The Sibyl told him they were phantoms.

At the Styx, the ferryman Charon poled his boat through crowds of shades. The unburied dead could not cross and wandered the near shore for a hundred years. Aeneas showed the Golden Bough. Charon recognized it and carried them across the dark water. Beyond the river, Cerberus blocked the path, three-headed and slavering, until the Sibyl threw him a honey cake laced with herbs. He swallowed it and collapsed.