But the Sybil, herself taught by Hecate, reveals to him the eternal punishments there inflicted for monstrous crimes. Then the visitors pass to Elysium, where dwell the souls of those whose deserts on earth have won for them a happy lot. Nearby in a green valley, Aeneas finds the shade of his own father, Anchises, looking eagerly at the souls which are waiting to be born into the upper world. In answer to his son’s questions, the heroic shade discloses the doctrine of rebirths--metempsychosis--with its tenets of penance and of purification.[3] Finally, to fulfill the poet’s purpose, Anchises’ spirit points out the souls of the heroes who are to come on earth in due season; the spirits of future Romans pass before Aeneas in long array; and at the climax he sees the soul of Augustus, that prince who was destined in the fullness of time to bring back the Golden Age and to impose peace on the wide world. This prophetic revelation ended, Aeneas enlightened and strengthened for his task, returns to the upper world. This book seems at first a strange compound indeed of popular belief, philosophy, and theology, which is not without its contradictions. On these, however, we need not pause; but for our present interest we must ask what are the main ideas on which this apocalypse is based. First of all, a future life is taken for granted by the poet; otherwise the book could never have been written. Secondly, we notice that, according to ancient popular belief, the souls of those who had not received the proper burial rites, were doomed to wander on this side of Acheron until a hundred years were completed, and also that souls which were disembodied by violence or by early death, were destined to live out their allotted span of earthly existence before they could enter the inner precincts of Hades. Again the poet represents some few as suffering eternal torments for their monstrous sins or enjoying immortal bliss because of their great deserts. And finally, he shows that the majority of souls must pass through successive lives and deaths, until, purified from the sin and dross of the body by millennial sojourns in the world below, and by virtuous lives on earth, they at last find repose and satisfaction. The popular beliefs which concern details of the future life we shall leave one side for the moment; let us rather first observe that Virgil’s ideas as to rewards and punishments in the next world, as well as his doctrine of successive rebirths and deaths with their accompanying purifications, rest on a moral basis, so that the other world is conceived to be a complement of this: life on earth and life below are opportunities for moral advance without which final happiness cannot be attained. Whence came these ideas of the future life and how far were they current in the ancient world of Virgil’s day?