My fellow classmates,
"There are two Gates of Sleep. One, they say, is horn and offers easy exit for true shades. The other is finished with gleaming ivory, but through it the Spirits send false dreams to the world above. Anchises escorted his son as he talked, then sent him with the Sibyl through the Gate of Ivory."
This quote, found at the very end of book 6, pages 160-161 to be specific, makes me think heavily back to the plenary lecture where the idea of Virgil taking subtle digs at Augustus during the writing of the Aeneid was brought up. The passage quoted occurs as Aeneas and the Sybil are coming back from the underworld, and are returning to the ships. When reading the books assigned for today, this is the area that stood out to me the most. Why would Virgil have the hero, the ancestor of Augustus, return to the world through the gates designated for spirits to send false dreams? Perhaps it is just because the plenary was recent and its message is partly in my mind, but I see this as Virgil hinting that this bloodline that Augustus claims is not actually intact. Aeneas continues his quest and his adventures, but never fully returns from the underworld, and in that way, Virgil is showing that there is no real relation between Augustus, the man who at one time took his land away, and now is telling him to write the epic depicting his lineage as related to the gods, and Aeneas, the hero and the son of a god. I know this could maybe be seen as a bit of a stretch, so I would love to hear all of your ideas, what do you think the purpose or outcome of Virgil's inclusion of this is on the story, or in the world in which he was writing?
After our discussion over this passage in Wednesday's lecture, I decided to go back and reread it. At first, I agreed with the general consensus that their was something significant about Anneas returning from the underworld through the gate of false dreams but I couldn't pin exactly what it was. After rereading the passage today I think it may be less significant than we previously thought. It says that the other gate is reserved for true shades, which can be interpreted as true spirits or ghosts. So it is possible that Anneas's exit through the gate of false dreams was merely a technicality because he was unable to exit through the gate of true shades. I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
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