Meta Description: Join Dr. Jeff Winkle and Dr. David Noe in Ad Navseam Episode 99 as they officially descend into the Underworld of Virgil’s Aeneid Book VI. Discover the bureaucratic nightmare of the Roman Hades, the Elm of False Dreams, the evolution of Charon the Ferryman, and the academic debate over the hesitating Golden Bough. Plus, how to master the Latin language and a classic C.S. Lewis parting shot.
Introduction: The Road to 99, Speed Listening, and the Threat of Smarch
Welcome back, classical gourmands, to a very special, milestone-adjacent edition of the Ad Navseam Podcast! Broadcasting directly from the subterranean depths of the bunker, your hosts, Dr. Jeff Winkle and Dr. David Noe, are officially celebrating Episode 99.
Reflecting on their long, arduous podcasting journey, Jeff admits he was genuinely shocked when the show managed to survive past episode 15. He jokes that he was fully ready to hang up his podcasting cleats and shuffle off into the locker room early on in the project. Now, staring down the barrel of their monumental 100th episode, both hosts are highly excited to keep pushing forward, marveling at the sheer number of hours listeners have willingly spent with their voices piping through their headphones. Dave shares an amusing, slightly painful anecdote about a former friend who cruelly—but perhaps fairly—admitted they were deeply relieved they no longer had to endure listening to Dave’s voice sped up at 1.5x speed.
To perfectly set the mood for today’s descent into the Roman underworld, Jeff quotes the lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s “We’re Going Down,” a fitting soundtrack for taking the mythological escalator from the food court down to the subterranean shoe store of Hades. The dreary, descending tone perfectly matches the underlying weather anxiety present outside the bunker. Despite the bright, sunny September sky currently gracing West Michigan, the hosts note that the dreaded, miserable season of “Smarch” is rapidly approaching. The beautiful fall weather is merely a locus amoenus (a highly pleasant, deceptive place) daring you to drop your guard and think the world is warm, right before winter suddenly comes around the corner and violently slaps you in the face.
The Shout-Out: Tennis Bagels and the Dog Quadriga
Before making the ultimate descent into Hades, the boys deliver a hearty, well-deserved shout-out to Dave’s longtime friend, Harry R. McLeod Jr., affectionately known to his friends as “Buster”. Dave and Buster met back in 2000 or 2001 in the great commonwealth of Virginia, where they used to play highly competitive, though clumsy, tennis together. Buster was famous for mercilessly chanting “no bagel, no bagel, no bagel” at Dave during his serves, a taunting reference to keeping a zero score in a tennis match.
Today, Buster lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, and stands at an incredibly imposing height approaching six-foot-six. He wrote in to say that Ad Navseam has quickly become his absolute favorite podcast. Buster listens to the show while simultaneously walking his four dogs, presenting a highly comical, almost G.K. Chesterton-esque image of a giant man being pulled wildly down the street like an ancient Roman quadriga (a four-horse chariot). Channeling the famous dog whisperer Cesar Millan, Buster notes that “a tired dog is a happy dog,” and listening to the podcast ensures that both he and his canine pack get plenty of exhausting miles in every single day. Jeff jokes that the image of a man being pulled in four directions simultaneously is reminiscent of ancient mythological punishments, such as the giant whose skin is stretched across nine acres.
The Golden Bough: Rites of Passage and Academic Presentism
The primary text for today is the continuation of Vergil’s masterpiece, Aeneid Book VI. Aeneas is standing at the physical entrance to the underworld, located geographically near the volcanic, sulfuric lakes of ancient Cumae and Avernus, preparing for his highly dangerous katabasis (descent).
To set the academic stage, Jeff references a 1968 journal article in Hermes titled “The Hesitation of the Golden Bough” by a scholar named Franz Steiner Verlag. The article focuses heavily on a highly debated moment from the previous episode: when Aeneas reaches out into the dark grove to pluck the magical Golden Bough (his required ticket into the underworld), Vergil uses the specific Latin word cunctantem, meaning the branch actively “hesitates,” resists, or clings to the tree. This physical resistance directly contradicts the Cumaean Sibyl’s earlier prophecy, which clearly stated the branch would easily and willingly fall into his hands if he were truly called by fate.
The hosts note that this is a classic folkloric “rite of passage” motif. It mirrors the Greek hero Theseus lifting the massive boulder to claim his father’s sword and sandals, King Arthur drawing the sword from the stone, or a superhero attempting to lift Thor’s mighty hammer, Mjolnir. In an entertaining aside, Dave jokes that his own personal rites of passage involved the sheer horror of filing his first 1040 tax return and painfully pulling his first A-minus out of a Greek class after a long, lazy string of B-pluses, while Jeff’s involved riding his completely unglamorous J.C. Penney Pinto moped.
Verlag’s 1968 article argues that the hesitation of the bough symbolizes a divided, deeply conflicted attitude toward the ultimate destiny of Rome and the brutal human cost of building an empire. In this reading, the violent tearing of the bough mirrors the violent destruction the Trojans will soon inflict upon the peaceful, indigenous populations of Italy.
Dr. Noe, however, pushes back hard against this highly subversive interpretation. He points out that this specific article was written during the fevered pitch of the Vietnam War in 1968, a time when western scholars were deeply skeptical of imperialism and state-sponsored warfare. Dave argues that reading anti-Augustan subversion into Vergil’s poetry is a blatant act of historical “presentism”—projecting modern, post-Enlightenment political anxieties onto an ancient poet who was fundamentally supportive of the Pax Augusta. Jeff agrees that framing ancient Italy as an idyllic, innocent landscape ruined by Trojan colonizers leans far too heavily on the “noble savage” archetype, though he maintains that Vergil was intentionally, and beautifully, acknowledging the heavy, bloody cost of Rome’s divine destiny.
The Underworld DMV and Ancient Piety
As Aeneas finally makes his descent to the conceptual tune of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move,” the hosts highlight a massive, fundamental difference between Homer’s Greek underworld and Vergil’s Roman one. While Odysseus’s journey into Hades in the Odyssey is a bleak, mysterious, and completely terrifying “Pain in the Nekyia,” the Roman underworld is incredibly, oppressively structured.
Dr. Winkle astutely compares the Vergilian underworld to a sprawling suburban shopping mall or the modern Department of Motor Vehicles (the Secretary of State’s office for Michigan residents). It is a massive, highly organized place where you can find absolutely everything you don’t want to find. Because Aeneas is stepping into a deeply bureaucratic system governed by deities with absolute, unquestionable power, he cannot be clever, witty, or rebellious. He simply has to pull his ticket, wait in line, follow the rules, and meticulously perform the exact ritual sacrifices to Hecate to get through.
This prompts a profound discussion generated by a question from one of Jeff’s mythology students: did the average ancient Greek or Roman actually believe in these detailed depictions of the afterlife?. Dave brings up two foundational books: Valerie M. Warrior’s text on Roman religion and André-Jean Festugière’s Personal Religion Among the Greeks. Dave makes the “dogmatic” point that while modern Christians often view themselves as fundamentally different from their ancient pagan predecessors, their actual daily practices and prayers are shockingly similar. Just as the Romans prayed for health, wealth, and academic success for their children to maintain the pax deorum, many modern believers fall into the identical “Divine Santa Claus” trap, treating religion as a transactional checklist to earn favor rather than a relationship built on unmerited grace.
Phantom Monsters and the Elm of False Dreams
At the very entrance to the underworld, standing in the literal jaws of Orcus, Aeneas is confronted by a terrifying, personified array of human miseries: Grief, avenging Cares, pale Diseases, sad Old Age, Fear, Hunger, foul Poverty, Death, Toil, Sleep (Death’s brother), lethal War, the Furies in iron cells, and mad Discord with her snaky hair entwined in bloody bands. Guarding the doors alongside these concepts are a veritable who’s-who of mythological monsters, including Centaurs, biformed Scyllas, the hundred-headed Briareus, the Lernaean Hydra, the Chimera armed with flame, Gorgons, Harpies, and the triple-bodied hybrid shade of Geryon.
Suddenly panicked by this ultimate, overwhelming haunted house, Aeneas draws his sword and prepares to hack the beasts to pieces. Fortunately, his guide, the Sibyl, intervenes just in time, informing him that these are merely hollow, bodiless phantoms flitting in the empty shadows.
In the exact middle of this dark courtyard stands a massive, spreading, aged elm tree. Vergil provides a beautifully evocative, haunting image: clinging securely to the bottom of every single leaf are false dreams. Jeff compares this imagery to the psychological concept of liminality—that weird, in-between state of waking up where a bizarre dream (accompanied by a soundtrack like Queensrÿche’s “Silent Lucidity”) still feels completely rational and real, right before you suddenly wake up and realize how entirely absurd it was. These false dreams drop from the leaves of the underworld directly into the minds of sleeping mortals, demonstrating that in Roman mythology, there is a much more fluid, active connection between the living and the dead.
Charon the Ferryman and the Unburied Dead
Moving deeper into the gloom, Aeneas and the Sibyl arrive at the muddy banks of the River Styx (prompting the hosts to jokingly quote the Talking Heads song “Take Me to the River” and the incredibly cheesy Styx anthem “Show Me the Way”). Here, the souls of the dead are desperately flocking to the shore, attempting to board the skiff of the underworld ferryman, Charon.
The hosts take a fascinating detour to examine how the character of Charon evolved dramatically over time. In ancient Greek art, particularly on funerary vases alongside Hermes the psychopompos, Charon is typically depicted as a “schlubby,” blue-collar workman wearing a ratty cloak and a slave’s cap. He is merely a tired guy performing an endless, miserable job, much like a modern highway construction worker completely disinterested in endlessly flipping a “stop/go” sign. Dave notes that repetitive, futile drudgery is a common theme of the underworld, jokingly comparing it to the agony of grading papers where students misspell the Iliad with two L’s—an error that Dave punishes by drawing frowny-face emojis directly on the exams so students know the error caused him personal emotional damage.
However, by the time we reach Vergil, and certainly by the time of Dante and Michelangelo’s terrifying Sistine Chapel fresco, Charon has been transformed into a skeletal, glowing-eyed, demonic figure. Dr. Noe points out that this demonization is part of the later Christianization of the underworld. While the Christian scriptures clearly outline the theology and reality of hell, the actual aesthetic imagery of demons, pitchforks, and horned ferrymen (seen heavily in pop culture like Disney’s Hercules, voiced by James Woods) was heavily borrowed and illustrated using later pagan Roman traditions.
Back on the banks of the Styx, Charon violently beats back the desperate crowds of souls. The Sibyl explains the harsh bureaucratic rules: Charon can only ferry across the souls of those who have received proper burial rites in the world above. Those whose bodies remain unburied must wander the shores in a bleak demilitarized zone for a full one hundred years before they are allowed to finally cross. Looking into the doomed crowd to the tune of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” (a song Jeff despises because Joe Perry’s guitar is out of tune), Aeneas weeps as he spots the ghosts of his lost comrades, including his unburied ship pilot Palinurus. Palinurus reveals that he actually survived falling off his ship, floated for four days, and reached Italy, only to be murdered by a band of marauders. Aeneas’s compassion for his lost crewman stands in stark contrast to Odysseus’s utter lack of concern for his own unburied crewman, Elpenor.
When Charon refuses to ferry the living Aeneas across the river, citing the past troubles caused by Hercules and Theseus, the Sibyl completely shuts down the ferryman’s complaints. She simply pulls the Golden Bough out of her bag, and Charon immediately falls silent and bows to the bough. Upon reaching the far shore, they encounter the three-headed dog Cerberus. The prepared Sibyl tosses the beast a honeyed cake laced with sleeping pills, dropping the massive monster instantly to the floor.
Sponsors: Fueling the Classical Renaissance
Before the hosts get permanently stuck waiting in line at the DMV of the Damned, they take a moment to thank the generous sponsors who keep the podcast alive and thriving.
- MossMethod & LatinPerDiem: Ready to master the classical tongues? Dave’s Moss Method will take your ancient Greek from “neophyte to erudite” utilizing the texts of Charles Melville Moss and weekly “Moffice Hours”. Alternatively, sign up to master the Latin language from the ground up using Hans Ørberg’s Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata at latinperdiem.com/llpsi.
- Ratio Coffee: Thanks to the highly creative entrepreneur Mark Hellweg—a man with a basic liberal arts degree who simply decided to revolutionize the home coffee machine—you can finally stop drinking mass-brewed coffee filled with a harsh “brackish tang”. The gorgeous Ratio 8 and Ratio 6 machines utilize a mathematical Fibonacci shower head to perfectly execute the bloom, brew, and ready stages, completely off-gassing the nasty CO2 for a perfectly mellow cup every single morning. Go to ratiocoffee.com and use the code ANCOV4 for 15% off your heirloom machine.
- Hackett Publishing: Celebrating their 50th golden anniversary, Hackett Publishing continues to provide high-quality, incredibly affordable translations of classical literature to students and scholars alike. With offices in Indianapolis and Cambridge, they offer a vast catalog spanning everything from the ancient world to Islamic and Latin American studies, saving college students from absurdly priced $185 textbooks. Do yourself a massive favor and visit hackettpublishing.com; enter the code AN2022 for 20% off your entire order and free shipping.
The Gustatory Parting Shot
To conclude this milestone 99th episode, Dave delivers an incredibly entertaining Gustatory Parting Shot from C.S. Lewis’s beloved classic, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
“‘It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating,’ said the Queen presently. ‘What would you like best to eat?’ ‘Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty,’ said Edmund.”
Dave reads the lines channeling the disturbing, icy delivery of actress Tilda Swinton. The mention of the gelatinous treat reminds Jeff of their podcasting trip to Greece. When they asked their wonderful tour guide, Christiana Dimitra, if they were eating Turkish Delight and drinking Turkish coffee, she sternly corrected them, fiercely proud of her heritage: “No, no, no. We have Greek delight. This is Greek coffee”.Whether you are chewing on a gelatinous cube of Greek delight or waiting for your number to be called at the underworld DMV, keep reading the classics. Valete!
