Aeneid lines 6.384-449 (class translation)

Therefore they finish the begun journey and approach a river. The sailor as he looked out from the Stygian wave at those who now thence go through a silent forest and turn their foot to the bank, thus first attacks with words and further roars: “Whoever you are, you who strive for our waters armed, speak, come now, why you come now thither, and check your step. This is the place of shadows, of sleep and slumbering night: it is unlawful to carry the living bodies on my Stygian ship. Truly I did not rejoice that I received Hercules coming on the lake nor Theseus nor Pirithous although they were born of the gods and unconquerable in strength. That man sought the guardian of Tartarus with chains in his hand and drug him trembling from the throne of the king himself; these attempted to lead the mistress of Dis from her bedchamber.”

In response to which the Amprhysian priestess briefly spoke: ”No such ambushes are here (cease to be bothered), nor do our weapons carry force; let the huge doorkeeper, barking for eternity in the cave, frighten the lifeless shadows; let pure Proserpina watch the boundary of her uncle. Trojan Aeneas, marked by piety and weaponry, descends towards his father to the lowest shadows of Erebus. If no image of such piety moves you, yet may you recognize this branch,” she displays the branch which was hiding in her clothes. Then the swollen hearts settle from anger; nor were more [spoken] than these. That man, admiring the venerable gift of the fateful maiden seen [again] after a long time, turns toward the bluish-black ship and approaches the bank. Next he drives away the other spirits, which were sitting along the long ridges, and he loosens the gangways; at once he receives huge Aeneas in his boat. The seamed boat groaned beneath the weight and, full of cracks, takes on much swamp water. At last across the stream he disembarks both the priestess and the man unharmed in the hideous mud and the gray-green sedge.

Huge Cerberus makes these halls resound with three-throated barking, lying hugely in the facing cave. To whom the prophetess, seeing his necks now bristle with snakes, throws a cake sleep-inducing with drugged fruit and honey. That one, opening his three mouths, snatches the tossed (offering) with rabid hunger and, having slumped to the ground, relaxes his great necks and stretches out through the entire cave. Aeneas seizes the entrance with the guard sleeping and swiftly escapes the shore of the uncrossable wave.

Immediately voices and a huge wailing and crying spirits of infants were heard in the very threshold whom a gloomy day stole and immersed in bitter death without a share of sweet life and snatched from the teat. Next to these are those damned to death by false crime. Nor indeed are these given abodes without lot, without judgment; the judge Minos moves the urn; that one both calls the assembly of the silent ones and learns their lives and crimes. Then the sad ones held next places, who innocent caused their own death by their own hand and, having hated the light, threw away their lives. How they wish now in the high upper-air to endure both poverty and hard labors. Divine will stands in the way and the hateful swamp of sad wave binds and Styx, poured round nine times, restrains (them). Not far from here the lamenting fields stretched into every area are pointed out; thus they call those. Here the secret paths hide and a myrtle forest conceals round those whom hard love consumes with cruel pining; their cares do not leave in death itself. In these places he sees Phaedra and Procris and wretched Eryphle showing the wounds of her cruel son, and Euadne and Pasiphae; Laodenea comes as companion to these, and Caeneus, formerly a youth, now a woman, returned back into her old form by fate.