Passing from these outer circles, the travellers reach the “Mourning Fields,” in which the poet places all the victims of love. If there was any doubt as to his view of the passion--that it was a lower appetite, excusable enough in man, but in a woman either to be reprobated or pitied according to circumstances--it would be set at rest by the characters of those victims with whom he peoples this unlovely region. Grouped together with such devoted wives as Evadne, who, when her husband fell in the Trojan war, slew herself for grief upon his funeral pile, and Laodamia, whose only crime was that by her too urgent prayers she won back her dead Protesilaus to her embrace for a few fleeting moments, and died of joy in his arms,[35] we find the treacherous Eriphyle, who, for the bribe of a golden necklace, persuaded her husband Amphiarus to go to his predestined death in the same war, and even such disgraces to their sex as were Phædra and Pasiphae. In these Mourning Fields Æneas meets one whom he would, it may be conceived, have very gladly avoided. Half veiled in mist, seen dimly like the moon through a cloud, Dido stands before him there: and thus, for the first time, he is made certain of her death. Æneas is ready with regrets, and even tears. “She on the ground averted kept Hard eyes that neither smiled nor wept; Nor bated more of her stern mood, Than if a monument she stood.” At last, without a word, she turns from her false lover, and seeks in the dim groves the society of her dead husband Sichæus. The Sibyl leads her companion on to the Field of the Heroes. There he sees the mighty men of old: the chiefs who fought against Thebes in the great siege which preceded that of Troy--Tydeus, and Adrastus, and Parthenopæus. There, too, are the shades of his own companions in arms, who fell in defence of their city. Among these last is one who has another tale to tell of the abominable Helen. It is Deiphobus, one of the many sons of Priam, to whom Helen had been given after the death of Paris. Æneas is shocked to see the unsubstantial shape of the prince bearing the marks of barbarous mutilation; his hands lopped, his face gashed, and his ears and nostrils cut off. (For, even in this shadowy existence, the ghosts all bear the marks of violent death--Dido’s self-inflicted wound being specially mentioned.) Æneas asks the history of this terrible disfigurement, and Deiphobus tells it at some length: how the double traitoress, who was then his wife, had led Menelaus and his companion, the accursed Ulysses, to the chamber where he lay sunk in sleep on the disastrous night of the city’s capture, and how they two had thus mangled his body.