David Siegel - The Plenitude of Arboreal Beauty

When Aeneas consults with the ghost of his father, Anchises, we find a passage heavily influenced by Neoplatonic thought. Anchises mentions “a celestial energy… slowed and dulled by mortal frames,” (VI 867) and warns that upon death “many corporeal taints remain, ingrained in the soul in myriad ways” (874). This is redolent of the Phaedo, Plato’s doctrine on the soul, which holds that pleasures and pains make the immaterial soul corporeal, riveting it to the material body. Plato’s epistemology is apparent when Anchises comments “[men], shut in the shade of their prison-houses, cannot see the sky,” (870), a line borrowed from The Allegory of the Cave virtually verbatim. At line 887 Anchises tells Aeneas how the waters of the river Lethe erase the memories of souls preparing to return to human bodies, and we immediately discern Plato’s theory of recollection, expounded in the Meno.