HadesRealm2.0100

HadesRealm2.0100

My cousin Mary is my coolest cousin, because she's a Delta Airlines flight attendant and travels all over the world... and because she sends me a postcard every now and then bragging about something cool that she's seen in her travels. The postcard Mary sent me (kinda) quotes Vergil in French. So, it's a modern usage of something that began in the Age of Augustus, a golden-age artifact.
      The postcard informs that Vergil is responsible for the statement that is inscribed over the entrance to the Paris catacombes and that is inscribed on the white postcard that came in the mail.
      If I were going to translate that French directly into Latin, I would not actually come up with Vergil's own statment in Aeneid 6.389-90 — The ferryman Caron states to Aeneas "Fare age, quid venias, iam istinc et comprime gressum. // Umbrarum hic locus est, somni noctisque soporae." I'd translate that "Come, tell me why you have come here and hold your step. This is the dwellingplace of the shades, the dwellingplace of sleep and of drowsy night."
      The translation by D.A. West (Aen. 6.389-90) reads thus: "...Come tell us why you are here. Speak to us from where you stand. Take not another step. This place belongs to the shades, to Sleep and to Night, the bringer of Sleep."
       So, those are appropriately off-putting words of warning that an authority figure might utter at the entrance to the catacombs, the "gates of death".
       But, the business of the "empire of death" is not really, technically in Vergil's statement. "Imperium" does not equal "locus" (which means just "place" in Latin).
      The difference is explained by the office of the Museums of Paris (Musées de Paris), which informs me that the saying by Vergil over the catacombs' entrance is from version of the Aeneid by the "poet Jacques Delille, the so-called Abbot Delille (1738-1813) who published his translation in 1804.