The Roman Entrance to Hades: Baiae & the Oracle of the Dead

Every religion and culture has their own story about the underworld or hell. For the Romans, the entrance, or one of the entrances, to this place was at Lake Avernus, near the city of Cumae. It is in a cave near Cumae that the Sibyl who gave King Tarquin the famous Sibylline Books lived. Beneath the town of Baiae, which is nearby both of these sites, is a tunnel complex which possibly hints at a belief in the Sibyl as a real, historical person, and which possibly was the ritual site of a cult of the dead, housing an Oracle of the Dead, a dark counterpart to the more famous Oracle of Apollo at Delphi