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.
But the Sibyl warns her companion, who stands absorbed in grief at his comrade's fate, that the permitted hours of their visit are fast passing away. She guides him on to where the path they are treading divides, leading in one direction to the Elysian Fields, in the other to Tartarus,—for the district which they have explored already is represented as of an entirely neutral character. On the left, Æneas sees
