Roman PantheonLake
Lake Avernus
The crater lake near Cumae in Campania that Roman poets placed at the entrance to the underworld; in the Aeneid, the Sibyl leads Aeneas down to the dead through the cave beside it.
About Lake Avernus
The gate of the underworld
Avernus lies in the volcanic Phlegraean Fields west of Naples, close to the Greek colony of Cumae, home of the Sibyl. Its steep wooded crater and the sulphurous air of the area made it, for Greek and Roman writers, a natural entrance to the realm of the dead. In Book 6 of Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas consults the Sibyl at Cumae, finds the golden bough, and descends with her through a deep cave by the dark lake, where no bird could fly over safely; the poem derives the name from the Greek aornos, 'birdless'.
A real lake, a working harbour
The myth did not stop practical use. In 37 BCE Agrippa connected Avernus to the Lucrine Lake and the sea to create the naval base Portus Julius, and the tunnel called the Grotta di Cocceio was cut toward Cumae. Visitors in later centuries were shown a tunnel on the shore as the 'Sibyl's cave'.
Proverbial
The Sibyl's warning that the descent to Avernus is easy, but the return is the real labour, became proverbial in Latin literature.
On the map
Lake Avernus among other places of the Roman Pantheon.
Sources and further reading
Source notes
These references are recorded in the catalog. Their passage wording and translation have not been checked, so quotations are not displayed here.
- Virgil, Aeneid, Book 6
About this entry
By Elizabeth Stein for Mythos Atlas. About the author. Editorial notes are grounded in the site's cited sources and can be challenged through the contact page.
Coordinates mark where the myths place a site, or where the tradition locates it today. Mythic realms are left off the map or marked as symbolic placements.