Page:Great Men and Famous Women Volume 5.djvu/38

14 WORKMEN AND HEROES deep wisdom ; and when tineas went to consult the Cumaean Sibyl, she told him that he must visit the under-world of Pluto to learn his fate. First, how- ever, he had to go into a forest, and find there and gather a golden bough, which he was to bear in his hand to keep him safe. Long he sought it, until two doves, his mother's birds, came flying before him to show him the tree where gold gleamed through the boughs, and he found the branch growing on the tree as mistletoe grows on the thorn. Guarded with this, and guided by the Sibyl, after a great sacrifice, ^Eneas passed into a gloomy cave, where he came to the river Styx, round which flitted all the shades who had never received funeral rites, and whom the ferryman, Charon, would not carry over. The Sibyl, however, made him take ^Eneas across, his boat groaning under the weight of a human body. On the other side stood Cerberus, but the Sibyl threw him a cake of honey and of some opiate, and he lay asleep, while ^Eneas passed on and found in myrtle groves all who had died for love among them, to his surprise, poor forsaken Dido. A little farther on he found the home of the warriors, and held converse with his old Trojan friends. He passed by the place of doom for the wicked, Tartarus ; and in the Elysian Fields, full of laurel groves and meads of asphodel, he found the spirit of his father Anchises, and with him was allowed to see the souls of all their descendants, as yet unborn, who should raise the glory of their name. They are described on to the very time when the poet wrote to whom we owe all the tale of the wanderings of ^Eneas, namely, Virgil, who wrote the " yEneid," whence all these stories are taken. He further tells us that ^Eneas landed in Italy, just as his old nurse Caieta died, at the place which still is called Gaeta. After they had buried her they found a grove, where they sat down on the grass to eat, us- ing large round cakes or biscuits to put their meat on. Presently they came to eating up the cakes. Little Ascanius cried out, " We are eating our very tables," and JEneas, remembering the harpy's words, knew that his wanderings were over. Virgil goes on to tell at much length how the king of the country, Latinus, at first made friends with ^Eneas, and promised him his daughter Lavinia in marriage ; but Turnus, an Italian chief who had before been a suitor to Lavinia, stirred up a great war, and was only conquered and killed after much hard fight* ing. However, the white -sow was found in the right place with all her little pigs, and on the spot was founded the city of Alba Longa, where .Eneas and Lavinia reigned until he died, and his descendants, through his two sons, Ascanius or lulus, and ^Eneas Silvius, reigned after him for fifteen generations.