The first place within the gate was assigned to the shades of infants, cut off in the very beginning of life, who filled their allotted region with loud wailings and weeping.  Beyond these were placed persons who had been put to death in consequence of false accusations.  Not even the unjust suffering which such persons had endured on earth could at once procure for them a place among those happy spirits declared free of guilt.  Here they were doomed to wait till the inexorable Minos examined each case and gave his award.  Immediately adjoining was the place allotted to those who, though unstained by crime, had become weary of life and had committed self-destruction.  Gladly, indeed, would they have now returned to the upper world they had despised, but no such return was possible to them.

AEneas and his companion next viewed a region named the Fields of Mourning,—­a wide tract, with shady paths and thick myrtle groves, dedicated to those who had died through unrequited love, and were held to have been emancipated by the miseries they had endured on earth from suffering any punishment below.  Here were to be seen, wandering disconsolately, many women of whom AEneas had heard in old legends of Greece and Troy.  Among them he beheld, with sorrow and pity, the ill-starred Queen of Carthage, the wound she had herself inflicted yet gaping in her fair bosom.  “Dido!” he exclaimed with tears, “was it then a true rumor that reached me of your having died after my departure, and by your own hand?  If I have been the cause of your death, I am indeed unhappy.  By all I hold sacred, fair queen, I swear to you that it was against my own will I quitted Carthage.  The will of the Gods, which now has brought me, while yet living, into these melancholy realms, drove me from you; but I dreamt not that our separation would bring upon you such extreme suffering.  Why will you not speak to me?  Why do you fly from me?  Never again will the Fates permit us to meet together.”  But all his entreaties and his tears were vain.  The spectre gazed upon him awhile with eyes of inexorable hate, and then turned away, with a gesture of unrelenting aversion, to a shady recess near by, where she was joined by the ghost of her first lord, Sichaeus, who by the compassion of Pluto had been permitted to bear her company.  AEneas resumed his journey, pondering sadly over the fate of the woman who but a little since had loved him so ardently and to whom he had unwillingly brought such misfortunes.  He and his guide now came to a place dedicated to the shades of renowned warriors.  Here he saw numbers of those brave Trojans, once his companions in arms, who had fallen before Troy.  They eagerly crowded around him, pressed his hands, and questioned him as to the circumstances which had brought him, while yet alive, amongst them.  There, too, were many Greeks who had perished during the Trojan war; but when they beheld the hero in the flesh, and wearing his gleaming armor, they fled from