previous next

[295] Hinc seems to mean that it is only after passing the gate of Orcus that they see the way to Acheron. Acheron is called ‘Tartareus’ from its dismal associations, though it is not, like Phlegethon v. 551, a river specially surrounding Tartarus, but apparently encompasses the whole of the lower world. But Virg.'s conception of the four infernal rivers, as given by Hom., is very confused. Hom. says briefly, Od. 10. 513 foll.: “ἔνθα μὲν εἰς Ἀχέροντα Πυριφλεγέθων τε ῥέουσιν
Κωκυτός θ᾽, ὃς δὴ Στυγὸς ὕδατός ἐστιν ἀπορρώξ:
πέτρη τε, ξύνεσίς τε δύω ποταμῶν ἐριδούπων,
”

but he does not mention them at all when he comes to the actual journey of his hero. Virg. conducts Aeneas over the water circumstantially, but from his description we should infer that there is only one river, which, after being called Acheron or Cocytus here, turns out eventually to be Styx, v. 385. Heyne remarks with justice (Excursus 9) that the poet would have found it awkward to have to describe the passage of all three, especially as Styx alone is said to surround the lower world nine times, v. 439. Generally we may say that Virg. found the notion of a single river of death most convenient for poetical purposes, but that he wished as usual to introduce the various points of the legends he followed, and so he employed the names Acheron, Cocytus, and Styx, whenever the river was to be spoken of, with a dim conception of Acheron as emptying itself into Cocytus, and perhaps of Styx as the most inward of the three, and a clear one of Phlegethon as specially surrounding Tartarus. Plato gives a much more definite description in his Phaedo, pp. 112, 113, speaking of four rivers, Ocean, Acheron, Pyriphlegethon, and Styx, the last of which disappears under the earth and reappears as Cocytus, an attempt apparently to realize the picture in Hom.: and later Roman poets, as Heyne observes, Exc. 9, have introduced varieties of their own.

John Conington. P. Vergili Maronis opera. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. The works of Virgil, with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Late Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London. Whittaker and Co., Ave Maria Lane. 1876.

The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: