Paget was one of the handful of men who still hoped to locate the “cave of the sibyl” described by Virgil, and it was this obsession that made him willing to risk the inhospitable interior. KAL is kalendas (1st day of every month) The sibyl, so the story goes, was a woman named Amalthæa who lurked in a cave on the Phlegræan Fields. But even the scanty evidence the two men had managed to gather during this early phase of their investigation persuaded them that it was worth pressing on. The first of these peculiar features occurred about 400 feet [125m] from the entrance, at a spot where the path diverged, only to merge again some 330 feet [100m] further into the complex. Upon death a soul is lead by Hermes to the entrance of the underworld and then carried across the Acheron. A visit to the underworld: the unsolved mystery of the tunnels at Baia, scribbling predictions of the future on oak leaves, there actually was “an Oracle of the Dead, A conversation for ‘The Antrum of Initiation, Baia. A lot of tedious politics has prevented this until now. The antrum at Baia proved difficult to explore. And the “dividing of the ways,” with its hidden door, would have allowed a party of priests – and the “sibyl,” too, perhaps – quick access to the hidden sanctuary. There is a tunnel leading up to the sanctuary from the back end of the Styx, frogmen found it and it connects up with a tunnel that can be seen leading off the sanctuary. The Fields, in short, are hellish, and it is no surprise that in Greek and Roman myth they were associated with all manner of strange tales. Oddities, striking characters and incidents, strange days... this is history with all the interesting bits left in, by the author of Batavia's Graveyard, Tulipomania and The First Family. As Paget and Jones dug this tunnel out, presumably the addition on this later plan is as a result of their work. Image: oracleofthedead.com. Virgil depicted her scribbling predictions of the future on oak leaves that lay scattered about the entrance to her cave, and states that the cave itself concealed an entrance to the underworld. The later Roman resort used geothermal hot springs, so there must have been water emerging from the ground in different places. Perhaps they really suspected that Hades was close below the surface, being such a hellish landscape, or they wanted to know what made the ground so hot, maybe thought there was a vast fire burning underground? The single entrance tunnel is about 18 to 20 inches wide, and runs dead straight for 428 feet to the divide. He was the last of the mythic kings of Rome, and some historians, at least, concede that he really did live and rule in the 6th century B.C. In Virgil’s Aeniad, for instance, the hero, Aeneas, crosses the Styx only once on his journey underground, emerging from Hades by an alternate route. 17th Annual Photo Contest Finalists Announced. My theory is that they didn’t know that the river was there; the tunnel was dug for unrelated reasons, either with the intent to build a subterranean temple, or because they wanted to explore. This feature made no sense if the tunnels were (as more mainstream archaeologists have always suggested) merely devised to channel warm air to Baia’s famous Roman baths above. Fantastic article on the Baiae underground […], I need to go here. Fire bursts from the rocks in places, and clouds of sulphurous gas snake out of vents that lead up from deep underground. What Was on the Menu at the First Thanksgiving? It had been concealed for centuries beneath dense undergrowth sprouting from a vineyard; Maiuri’s workers had to clear a 15-foot-thick accumulation of earth and vines to lay it bare. In time, “Doc” came up answers to all of those questions. Jorge Luis Borges, Poem of the Gifts. The first curious onlookers who pressed their heads into its cramped entrance discovered a pitch-black passageway that was uncomfortably hot and – so Maiuri reported – wreathed in fumes; they penetrated only a few feet into the interior before beating a hasty retreat. According to legend, the sibyl traveled to Tarquin’s palace bearing nine books of prophecy that set out the whole of the future of Rome. Continue The tunnel angle shown here is wrong, but the tunnel does lead to a chamber within the hill, with some other extremely narrow tunnels running from it. It is fair to say that most of those who have come after him have admitted themselves more or less baffled by at least some of the odder aspects of the tunnels. Sources I wish we had more definite information. Baia and the Bay of Naples, painted by J.M.W. Most interesting, perhaps, is the myth of the Cumæan sibyl, who took her name from the nearby town of Kyme – Cumæ – a Greek colony that flourished in about 550 B.C., when the Etruscans still held sway much of central Italy and Rome was nothing but a city-state ruled over by a line of tyrannical kings. The sibyl, so the story goes, was a woman named Amalthæa who lurked in a cave on the Phlegræan Fields. One central question may well be whether it is possible to see Paget’s channel of “boiling water” deep underground as anything other than a deliberate representation of one of the fabled rivers that girdled Hades – if not the Styx itself, then perhaps the Phlegethon, the mythic “river of fire” that, in Dante’s Inferno, boils the souls of the departed. There is no guide who will take you down any of these tunnels. Lewis also found a tunnel leading up to Paget’s “sanctuary” from the back end of the Styx. Century upon century of secrets…. There is a single ferry run by Charon to take the souls across the river. Virgil depicts her scribbling the future on oak leaves that lay scattered about the entrance to her cave, and states that the cave itself concealed an entrance to the underworld. Paget was not a professional archaeologist. The antrum at Baiæ proved difficult to explore. The volcano is still active, but, today, its most obvious feature is this barren, rubble-strewn plateau. The prof. studied it and he is sure it is possible to read: He says this is a quite standard way of portraying Roman dates. And the river itself was hot to the touch–in places it approached boiling point. The interior included an oddly complex network of narrow passageways, the entrances to some of which proved to be blocked up or disguised, and whose precise purchase Paget could only guess at. Being Roman, etc? Over the years several spots, the best known of which lies close to Lake Avernus, have been identified as the antro della sibilla–the cave of the sibyl. Of alternative explanations, only one–that the tunnels were once part of a system designed to supply hot mineral-rich waters to bathhouses above–feels plausible, though it certainly does not explain features such as S-bends designed to hide the wonders ahead from approaching visitors. So what was the “Great Antrum,” as Paget called it? These theories eventually made their appearance in book form but attracted little attention–surprisingly, because the pair claimed to have stumbled across nothing less than a real-life “entrance to the underworld.”. Baiae and the Bay of Naples, painted by J.M.W. John Adcock, Yesterday's Papers, "You can write something and every sentence in it will be a fact, you can pile up facts, but it won't be true. They served the Republic well until the temple burned down in 83 B.C., and so vital were they thought to be that huge efforts were made to reassemble the lost prophecies by sending envoys to all the great towns of the known world to look for fragments that might have come from the same source. That whole complex sounds like it might have been full of secret tunnels and rooms, where who knows what Bacchanalian rites were performed. The sibyl further laments (to Aeneas) ( Log Out / Swung closed, this would have masked the entrance to a second tunnel that acted as a short-cut to the lower levels. “Obvious that it was a natural cave that was widened”? It took Paget and Jones, working in difficult conditions, some time to explore what turned out to be a highly ambitious tunnel system. It is off-limits to anyone, even if permission is requested of the authorities. ( Log Out / There is no trace of the boiling river at the surface–and it was not until the 1970s, after Paget’s death, that his collaborators finally discovered, by injecting colored dyes into its waters, that it flows into the sea miles away, on the northern side of Cape Miseno. In Virgil’s Aeniad, for instance, the hero, Aeneas, crosses the Styx only once on his journey underground, emerging from Hades by an alternate route. In the Footsteps of Orpheus. Because of this, the quest continued, and gradually the remaining searchers focused their attentions on the old Roman resort of Baia, which lies on the Bay of Naples at a spot where the Phlegræan Fields vanish beneath the Tyrrhenian Sea. 2. In the cave, instead of Barnabas's wife, you will meet his daughter, also named Leda. I don’t know about obvious, but this could be. Baiae lies at the northeastern tip of the peninsula of Bacoli, at the extreme westerly end of the Fields. It might have been dug by adherents to a totally different religion, and was later filled in when the authorities cracked down on the cult and destroyed it, because they felt it was desecrating their gods.