Had I a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths, a voice of iron and a chest of brass, I could not tell all the forms of crime, could not name all the types of punishment.

This line is spoken by the Sibyl of Cumae in Virgil’s *Aeneid* during Aeneas’s katabasis (descent to the underworld) in Book 6. As she guides Aeneas through the realms of the dead, she points out Tartarus—the prison of the damned—and begins to describe the multitude of offenses punished there and the variety of torments assigned to them. The hyperbolic claim that even “a hundred tongues” could not recount all crimes and punishments underscores the underworld’s vast moral accounting and prepares the reader for a catalogue-like glimpse of exemplary sinners rather than an exhaustive inventory.

The quotation uses deliberate exaggeration to convey the inexpressible scale and complexity of human wrongdoing and its consequences. By pairing “forms of crime” with “types of punishment,” Virgil stresses a moral symmetry: transgression is not only abundant but also met with correspondingly varied retribution. In the *Aeneid*’s underworld episode, this functions rhetorically to magnify Tartarus as a space of awe and dread, while also reinforcing Roman ethical and civic ideals—warning that violations of social, familial, and religious obligations carry weight beyond mortal life. The line also signals the limits of language in the face of total moral knowledge.