Aeneas And The Sibyl

By Dirk Bontes

According to the author's analysis the Underworld was not a location inside the Earth, but rather it was a huge space station in a geostationary orbit below our planet in space. Aeneas is brought there in a spaceshuttle by his guide the Sibyl and he returns to the Earth by means of a stargate. He observes many unfamiliar phenomenons in the Underworld, which the author explains using modern technological and scientific concepts. The event occurs a short time after the legendary city of Troy was conquered by the Greeks, thousands of years ago.
The advanced technology which Aeneas, the son of a human and of the goddess Aphrodite, experiences, was produced by an earlier human species: that of the gods.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dirk Bontes
• Release date: Jun 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310489976

Dirk Bontes

Won some short story contests. Runs another. All Scifi / Fantasy / Horror. Has written some uncompleted science books. Has translated and interpreted Aeneid VI: Aeneid Liber Sextus.

Book preview

Aeneas and the Sibyl

This is a translation and clarification for our times by Dirk Bontes of the sixth book of the Aeneid.

Cover illustration: Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-1677)

Cover: Anaïd Haen

Published by Dirk Bontes at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Dirk Bontes

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Table of contents

0. A review of this book

1. Introduction

2. Accountability

3. Liber VI

4. Comments

5. About the author

6. Other titles by Dirk Bontes

7. Connect with me

Chapter 0. A review of this book

This review was written by A. Scriptor for The New Satyrica.

Dirk Bontes’ Aeneas and the Sibyl took me a fair old while to figure out. The fact that I was sent two forms of the novella to read, one being a simplified version, was hardly a promising start. The premise of the novella is a reversal of Aeneas’ katabasis to the Underworld with the Sibyl, which is replaced by a futuristic anabasis by means of space rocket… Need I say more? The author’s attempt to combine Swords and Sandals and Star Trek has laughable results; simply putting the word cyber in front of other words does not make something futuristic.Cyber pigeons simply sounds unimaginative and, if anything, it disrupts the flow of what is otherwise impeccably translated Latin.

That is the odd thing about this novella. The blend of actual translated Virgilian Latin and homemade additions left me confused as to what I was actually reading. I shall be dead honest and simply put it out there that I didn’t understand the vast majority of the novella, even after re-reading it. I think the author had a sound idea with regards to looking at the Aeneid from a twenty-first century perspective, and makes a good point when he talks about how we look at things differently to the Romans, on account of the fact that our civilisation has progressed to a point where we can rationalise things that the Romans would have considered supernatural or divine. We could rationalise Hermes’ flight across the sky as an aeroplane, or in this instance, a space rocket. However, all of this smells of that TV programme, Ancient Aliens.

This work is neither overtly fictional nor does it completely relocate the Aeneid into a time where higher supernatural beings roamed the Earth. Nor is it academic enough to look at the Aeneid in a brand new light that can be taken entirely seriously. Quite honestly, I simply didn’t know what to make of it. It was entertaining, but only in a fun-poking kind of way. The novella did get me thinking about how much civilisation has progressed since Virgil’s time. By this I mean in terms of technology, not literary advancement. In real terms, I think Virgil will be turning in his grave knowing that someone has taken a cleaver to his magnum opus and savaged it completely. If this is civilisation’s new way of writing its literature, we have most certainly regressed.

Chapter 1. Introduction

This is the easy to read, simplified version of my e-book 'Aeneid Liber Sextus'. I decided to do this easy to read version after I got negative comments about the original version: it reads like an academic treatise, the English used is very old English, it reads like an old bible, the line numbers and the interruptions make it very difficult to read. I appreciated those negative comments and wrote this easy to read version in response.

Both versions – the easy to read and the more difficult to read – are available to the public.

However, skipping the line numbers is one easy thing to do, but the many interruptions with my comments, linguistic analyses and interpretations were essential in making sense of the original Latin text. Omitting them would result in a significant loss of information. My solution was to incorporate some of this information into the text of the translation. I was also forced to present in this easy to read version some speculations as facts. This book therefore does not present the original Latin text, but an augmented text.

A lot of information was deleted, reducing the text from about twenty-eight thousand words to about sixteen thousand words.

In my opinion the more difficult to read 'Aeneid Liber Sextus' is the better version. I therefore recommend that people who have read this easy to read version and who want to know more about the subject and about my ideas about mythology also read the more difficult original version.

You may wonder whether the remarkable things that are in my translation are truly explicitly present in the original Latin text. Some are