The gates of sleep in Aeneid 6: Falseness, poetry, and history

Abstract

Since falsehood, following Hesiod´s tradition (Theog. 26-28), is linked to poetry--as the Muses can utter ψεύδεα πολλά capable of being believed as truth (i. e., plausible, uerisimilia)--, the gate of falsa insomnia crossed by Aeneas hesiodically suggests that the speech of Anchises, the history Virgil chooses to represent in Book 6, is in the realm of false things, though in a literary sense: that is, in the realm of plausible things, of poetry. At issue is history as poetic construction, emphasized especially by: 1. Anchises´ use of the word dicta to make explicit the fata; 2. fertur´s allusion to Homer and the Varronian derivation from fari of the word falsus; 3. the fact that at the very beginning of the book, an artist, Daedalus, sculpts some gates introducing the artistic interpretation for the final image of the gates (continued in the Shield of Vulcan); 4. the use of word uates in the sense of poet, vicariously applied to the mythic poet Musaeus in the catabasis and, immediately (7,41), in the prelude of the "historic" horrida bella. What is a construction to the reader is, for the character Aeneas, a revelation known only in general terms.