The Cloak of Stars

This chapter studies the vision of the cosmos set out in the speech of Anchises at Virgil’s Aeneid 6.724–51, comparing it to the response of Dante in Paradiso Canto IV. This passage of the Aeneid draws predominantly, the author argues, on the account of the universe in Plato’s Timaeus. The result of the combination of this speech with the underworld journey is that there are two kinds of space in Aen. 6: the linear journey, and the synoptic vision. Virgil commentators, ancient and modern, have tried to simplify Virgil’s space through allegory, whereby the underworld is seen as merely a cover for the cosmos. The former is ascribed to Virgil’s epic voice, the latter to his philosophical one. In the author’s view the philosophical voice does not silence the epic one. Rather than seeing the underworld as a veil, a “fiction” thinly concealing the philosophical “truth” of a celestial afterlife, we can see Virgil’s underworld as a mesh through which the upper world appears.