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Further, the stratagem of one man is said to have added to the credibility of the story. For, when the citizens were disturbed by the loss of the king and were hostile toward the senators, Julius Proculus as it is told, a man of repute, (at least he was the author of this important thing) addressed the assembly. ‘Romulus, Quirites,’ he said, ‘the father of this city, at the first light of this day, descended from the sky and clearly showed himself to me. While I was awed with holy fright, I stood reverently before him asking in prayer that I might look at him without sin.’ ‘Go,’ he said, ‘announce to the Romans that Heaven wishes that my Rome shall be the capital of the earth; therefore, they shall cultivate the military; they and their descendants shall know that no human might can resist Roman arms.’ He said this and went on high. It is a great marvel what credence was generated by the man’s tale, and how the loss of Romulus, for which the common people and the army grieved, was assuaged by the belief in his immortality. (1.16)

Livy’s ironic attitude points out the value of the heavenly journey as a proof of immortality and as mythical underpinning of the developing Roman imperial system.

Vergil

VERGIL EXPLICITLY copies the form of the Odyssey, but it is a Platonic universe that he describes in his Nekyia, his séance to the underworld. In Book 6 of the Aeneid, pious Aeneas visits the dead, just as crafty Odysseus had before him in book 11 of the Odyssey. The major events of Odysseus’ journey are reenacted in Aeneas’ own journey. The readers were obviously familiar with what Odysseus saw in the land of the dead, but on the issue of life after death, and many other things, Vergil has made some revealing improvements on Homer.

Vergil’s depiction of the underworld is remarkable in that it involves the kind of reward and punishment characteristic of the Platonic worldview. Under the tutelage of the Cumean Sibyl, the equivalent of Odysseus’ Circe, Aeneas sets out on a guided tour of Hades. In front of him is the golden bough which Proserpine (Greek: Persephone) favors. Vergil’s reference to Proserpine is appropriate, given the topic which he intends to pursue: death and its transcendence.

In Vergil’s underworld, dead infants must stay outside the gates, constantly raising their shrill and plaintive cries; but they are not subject to any special torments. Inside the gates, by contrast, Minos presides over a court of the silent (silentum concilliumque vocat), ostensibly dispensing final justice (Aen. 6.432). Vergil’s version of the realms of Hades are divided by ethical categories and are completely missing from Homer.

Phoenician Dido, whom Aeneas had to abandon in order to fulfill his Roman destiny, is but one of the tragic horde of the indolent and unmanly whom unyielding love has consumed to cruel wasting (quos durus amor crudeli tabe peredit, 6.442). The parallel with Odysseus’ dalliance with Calypso and Circe is clearly the model for this incident. This is why Dante, literally as well as figuratively following the poet Vergil in his Divine Comedy, compassionately puts Paolo and Francesca at the highest rank of the “inferno.” But compassion is not necessarily why Vergil has placed Dido where she is. As the fate of Dido shows, not Plato’s transcendent love but stern Roman duty to the state is the highest good in this Roman vision of heaven. Dido represents both Rome’s ancient enemy, Carthage, and a more recent one, Egypt.

No doubt Vergil had Antony and Cleopatra’s recent bad example in mind when he wrote that Aeneas must forsake the beautiful African temptress to build the city of Rome. That is what Antony and Cleopatra’s enemy Octavius Augustus would have had Antony do. In Octavius’ estimation, Antony should have left his Egyptian whore and return to his rightful wife, Octavius’ own sister. After Octavius defeated Antony and Cleopatra to secure the Roman republic for himself in 31 BCE, he assumed the title Augustus