"The descent to the infernal regions is easy enough, but to retrace one's steps, and reach the air above, there's the rub"
About this Quote
Hell, Virgil suggests, is not a cliff you fall off. Its genius is that it feels like a slope.
The line turns on an unnerving asymmetry: going down is “easy enough,” almost casual, as if the underworld were just another road with good signage. The real drama sits in the pivot - “but to retrace one’s steps” - where the sentence tightens into moral physics. Vice, despair, political violence, even grief: they all have momentum. They invite you to keep walking because each step makes the next one feel smaller, more justified, more inevitable. Escape demands the opposite kind of force: memory, will, discipline, grace. That’s “the rub,” a phrase that undercuts heroic fantasies with a shrug of realism. Virgil isn’t painting damnation as exotic; he’s making it practical.
Context matters: Virgil writes in an Augustan world obsessed with order after civil war, when the question wasn’t whether Rome could conquer, but whether it could recover from what it had become. In the Aeneid, the katabasis (the descent to the dead) is a narrative engine for founding empire, yet Virgil keeps slipping in the cost accounting: every origin story has a basement. The underworld is less a supernatural set piece than a moral audit.
Subtext: the threat isn’t temptation as fireworks. It’s ease. A culture can normalize its own infernal habits, then discover that climbing back to “the air above” requires more than regret; it requires remaking the self and, by implication, the city.
The line turns on an unnerving asymmetry: going down is “easy enough,” almost casual, as if the underworld were just another road with good signage. The real drama sits in the pivot - “but to retrace one’s steps” - where the sentence tightens into moral physics. Vice, despair, political violence, even grief: they all have momentum. They invite you to keep walking because each step makes the next one feel smaller, more justified, more inevitable. Escape demands the opposite kind of force: memory, will, discipline, grace. That’s “the rub,” a phrase that undercuts heroic fantasies with a shrug of realism. Virgil isn’t painting damnation as exotic; he’s making it practical.
Context matters: Virgil writes in an Augustan world obsessed with order after civil war, when the question wasn’t whether Rome could conquer, but whether it could recover from what it had become. In the Aeneid, the katabasis (the descent to the dead) is a narrative engine for founding empire, yet Virgil keeps slipping in the cost accounting: every origin story has a basement. The underworld is less a supernatural set piece than a moral audit.
Subtext: the threat isn’t temptation as fireworks. It’s ease. A culture can normalize its own infernal habits, then discover that climbing back to “the air above” requires more than regret; it requires remaking the self and, by implication, the city.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
|---|---|
| Source | Virgil, Aeneid, Book VI , Latin: "Facilis descensus Averno; noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis; sed revocare gradum, superasque evadere ad auras, hoc opus, hic labor est." Common English rendering: "The descent to the infernal regions is easy..." |
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