Locus Avernus
The volcanic lake near Cumae in Italy used by Aeneas as an entrance to the Underworld in Virgil's Aeneid.
The Story of Locus Avernus
Lake Avernus was a deep volcanic crater lake near Cumae in southern Italy, surrounded by thick forest and emitting sulphurous vapours. The Greeks who colonised Cumae called it Aornos — "birdless" — because the toxic fumes killed birds that flew over it. It was identified as one of the entrances to the Underworld, and the Cumaean Sibyl guided Aeneas down into the realm of the dead through a cave on its shore. According to tradition, Odysseus also consulted the dead near here rather than in the Black Sea, conflating Greek and Italian traditions of the nekuia — the ritual summoning of the dead.
Parents
{Persephone (domain below),Sibyl (guide)}
Children
{}
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Fun Fact
Ancient writers confirmed the lake's birdless nature from direct observation — volcanic carbon dioxide emissions do genuinely kill birds and animals near the surface, giving real teeth to the myth.
Words We Inherited
English words and phrases that trace back to this myth. See our full guide to English words from Greek mythology.
Explore Further
Lake Avernus
🏛 placeunderworld, entrance
A volcanic crater lake near Cumae believed to be an entrance to the Underworld, whose noxious fumes were said to kill birds flying overhead.
Stymphalus
🏛 placeGeography
A lake and region in Arcadia where Heracles defeated the man-eating Stymphalian Birds as his sixth labour
Aetna
🏛 placevolcano, Sicily
The great volcano of Sicily, beneath which Zeus imprisoned the monster Typhon and where Hephaestus kept his forge.
Pieria
🏛 placeSacred geography
The region at the foot of Mount Olympus sacred to the Muses, who were sometimes called the Pierides
Lerna
🏛 placeSwamp of the Hydra
Lerna was a marshy region near Argos, famed as the lair of the Lernaean Hydra and believed to contain one of the entrances to the underworld.
Meroe
🏛 placegeography
A distant African kingdom mentioned in Greek mythology as the land at the source of the Nile, associated with the Ethiopians.
Lemnos
🏛 placeIsland of Hephaestus
Lemnos was a volcanic island in the northern Aegean sacred to Hephaestus, where the god of the forge landed after Zeus hurled him from Olympus.
Taenarum
🏛 placeSacred geography
A promontory at the southern tip of the Peloponnese believed to contain an entrance to the underworld
Arethusa Spring
🏛 placeSacred geography
A fresh-water spring on the island of Ortygia in Syracuse, sacred to Artemis and linked to the nymph Arethusa
Chaonia
🏛 placegeography
A region of northwestern Greece (Epirus) associated with the oracle of Dodona and the earliest Greek mythology.
Tempe
🏛 placeSacred geography
The Vale of Tempe, a gorge in Thessaly sacred to Apollo where laurel for the Pythian Games was gathered
Crisa
🏛 placegeography
A Phocian city below Delphi, sometimes confused with Cirrha, associated with Apollo's arrival in central Greece.