Tuesday, 3 September 2013

Dido's Tragedy: Book IV, The Aenied

Dido's Tragedy

What is it about Dido’s love that drives her to destruction? To what extent is she responsible for her own downfall?

But the queen—too long she had suffered the pain of love,
Hour by hour nursing the wound with her lifeblood
Consumed by the fire buried in her heart.[1]

This opening to book IV of The Aeneid not only announces the two prevailing images Virgil will use to describe Dido’s love, but it also alludes to her fate—Dido is doomed. It seems that all the forces of epic world are conspiring to this end: the gods, even Dido’s supposed protector, Juno; Dido’s own faithful sister, Anna; and finally, Aeneas, though somewhat passively, through his looks and his words. These forces have conspired to inflame in Dido a love that will give her body no rest, until it destroys that very body. Equally however, the queen herself is driven by her passion for Aeneas and forsakes the bonds of marriage and the duties of a queen to her people, in order to pursue her lust. Book IV offers the reader much scope for both a sympathetic and a critical reading of the queen and her tragedy.

This essay, then, will firstly identify the key characteristics of Dido’s love that make it inherently destructive 1) Her love for Aeneas is too ardent, too all consuming a passion 2) It is an imbalanced and therefore intrinsically insecure love 3) Dido conflates her public and private lives so that when Aeneas flees her fall is absolute. Secondly, the degree to which Dido is responsible for this love, and her subsequent demise, will be considered.

When the mist that conceals Aeneas’ presence in front of the temple of Juno is lifted, Aeneas, looking like a god, lauds the queen for her hospitality and declares that “So long as rivers run to the sea … your honour, your name, your praise will live forever, whatever lands may call me to their shores”[2]. This is an early example of the kind of prophetic statement that Virgil employs in the lead up to the tragedy of Dido[3]; it is prophetic as it is precisely because of a call to a foreign land that Aeneas will, instead of praising and honouring Dido, facilitate her demise. Significantly, having completed this greeting to Dido, Aeneas turns and nonchalantly shakes hands with Trojan friends. Dido, by contrast, is marvelled both by the sight of Aeneas and by all that he has suffered. This is significant not only as it is a subtle illustration of a difference between the feelings of Aeneas and Dido towards each other, but also because this understated but notable physical reaction to Aeneas, by Dido, occurs before Venus and Cupid have besieged the queen with the flames of passion[4].

It is not surprising, then, that after Venus intervenes, Dido’s physical passion for Aeneas becomes insatiable; significantly, this passion finds early expression in her reaction to Cupid, disguised as Aeneas’ son, Ascanius[5]. Gutting argues this represents the perversion of Dido’s conjugal and maternal instincts, resulting in the subordination of these instincts to erotic ones as her relationship with Aeneas develops[6].  Dido herself helps to illustrates this by placing her feelings for Aeneas in opposition to those for her deceased husband, Sychaeus, creating a struggle between her sense of duty and the furor of her passion[7]. Ostensibly, it is Dido’s sister, Anna, who enables her to move past her sense of shame and pursue a relationship with Aeneas. However, it appears that Dido misinterprets her sister’s sentiments, which rather than an emotive endorsement of a physical love are more concerned with the familial and dynastic advantages of a partnership with Aeneas[8]. Anna’s words, then, have mistakenly “fanned her sister’s fire,”[9] and Dido, from this juncture on, becomes “the tragic queen”[10] of Carthage.

As Dido’s passion grows, we see an antagonism between private desire and public benefit develop, which is at the heart of Aeneas and Dido’s relationship. Crazed by love, Dido neglects the affairs of the city, leaving Carthage vulnerable to attack from neighbours whom, in the first instance, have been slighted by her favouring of the Greek traveller. Her relationship is leading to public disgrace. Equally, her private sense of guilt and shame is never lost, even after the disputed marriage in the cave[11]. Dido’s neglecting of state affairs and her continued sense of guilt show that her passion has over taken everything else that matters to her. But what of Aeneas, is he equally enraptured with the queen?

The question of Aeneas’ feelings is difficult to answer, as, throughout book IV, Aeneas is most notable for his absence, and, when he does appear, for his taciturn and unemotional state of mind[12]. Indeed, it is not until he has decided that the affair is over that we are explicitly told anything about his feelings. It does appear that Aeneas may not have had the same strength of feeling as Dido. His willingness to abandon her, without a moment’s hesitation or a word of protest against Jupiter’s will, is indicative of this. Equally, Dido’s volatile reaction to the rumour that the “Trojans are on the move” betrays her own insecurity[13]; this was an outcome she had foreseen. The agon like exchange that follows recalls Medea and Jason, during which Aeneas assumes a less then admirable passivity, deferring to the will of the gods[14]; this passivity is not shared by Dido whose invective moves from accurate and reasonable to an uncontrolled fury that resembles the heroic Aeneas of book II, again betraying both the strength of her emotions for Aeneas and her own insecurity. It should be noted that by now her insecurity is well founded; her neighbours are becoming aggressive, her people’s loyalty towards her is wavering, and Aeneas, a man who had assumed the role of protector of Carthage and of Dido’s lover, is fleeing.

In this we see a conflation of public and private calamities for Dido, a mistake that, with the help of a timely reminder from Jupiter and Mercury, Aeneas is unwilling to make. This is the essential difference between Dido and Aeneas’ emotional states and leads Aeneas[15] to the pursuit of his promised country and Dido to the only end left to her, destruction.  Aeneas, though probably feeling genuine affection for the queen, is not so completely invested in the relationship as Dido. This has led some, for example McLeish[16], to argue that Virgil’s inclusion of Dido in The Aeneid serves to emphasize Aeneas pietas. Aeneas had been passive and forgetful of his duty through the first half of book IV, but a single stern nudge from Jupiter is enough to remind the now Pius Aeneas of what must be done. However, Virgil does not let Aeneas completely off the hook for his dalliance. In what might be called a piece of poet justice, it is the tragedy of Dido that gives birth to the enmity between Rome and Carthage: a future public calamity to be visited upon Aeneas’ people through the agency of Hannibal[17]. 

So to what degree can we blame these events upon Dido? To a large extent Dido is the tragic queen because she is burdened with a love, by Venus, which destroys her very essence. The perversion of her conjugal and maternal instincts is an extremely cruel act of the gods; equally, the failure of Juno, her own benefactor, to act for Dido, rather than simply against Aeneas, means that she is almost completely isolated but for the help of her loyal yet somewhat misguided sister, Anna. Aeneas appears to have led her on to a certain degree, assuming the role of husband, and indeed to some extent king, without the deep sense of responsibility that these roles require. In these ways it is easy to see Dido as victim. However, it must be considered, as demonstrated above, that Dido’s feelings were not wholly divinely inspired; she was strongly attracted by Aeneas before Venus had struck. Additionally, as Duckworth argues, the intervention of the gods in the epic tradition often serves “merely to accentuate or inflame a state of mind already eager to do what the deity wishes”[18]. Bryce argues that a similar phenomenon is occurring between Anna and Dido; a kind of doubling effect, with Anna offering the advice that Dido’s sub-conscious wants to hear, to enable her pursuit of Aeneas[19].

These elements of Dido’s struggle raise important questions over fate, divine intervention and human will. To some extent, who is specifically responsible for the tragedy of Dido cannot be easily resolved, certainly not in this brief essay.  However, whatever forces inspired this fatal love in her, it is her battle against it, her submission to it, and her defiance in the face of its failure that offer the reader ample scope to view her as a tragic heroine, and as a magnificent poetic creation. Perhaps it is only in the afterlife that we may glimpse at the true Dido; defiant and loyal to her husband, yet undeniably still in love with the hero Aeneas.

But she, her eyes fixed on the ground turned away …
And at last she tears herself away, his enemy forever,
Fleeing back to the shadowed forests where Sychaeus,
Her husband long ago, answers all her anguish,
Meets her love with love … [20]

Bibliography

Primary Sources

Virgil, The Aeneid, ed. and transl. R. Fagles, New York: Penguin Classics, 2006.

Secondary Sources

Bryce, T. R., ‘The Dido-Aeneas Relationship: A Re-Examination’, The Classical World 67 (1974), 257-269.

Duckworth, G. E., ‘Fate and Free Will in Vergil’s “Aeneid”’, The Classical Journal 51 08 (1956), 357-364.

Fratantuono, L., Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil’s Aeneid, Plymouth: Lexington Books (2007).

Gutting, E., ‘Marriage in the Aeneid: Venus, Vulcan, and Dido’, Classical Philology 101 03 (2006), 263-279.

Hamilton, C. I. M., ‘Dido, Tityos and Prometheus’, The Classical Quarterly 43 01 (1993), 249-254.

McLeish, K., Dido, Aeneas, and the Concept of Pietas, Greece and Rome 19 02 (1972) 127-135.

Moorton, R. F., ‘Love as Death: The Pivoting Metaphor in Vergil’s Story of Dido’, The Classical World 83 03 (1990), 153-166.


[1] Aeneid, Book IV, 1-3
[2] Aeneid, Book I, 728-729
[3] Moorton, 1990, for example, describes the way that Virgil uses fire and the wounded animal as prophetic images that anticipate her death and the means of her destruction.
[4] Aeneid, Book I, 805
[5] Aeneid, Book I, 850-854 “Dido … cannot feast her eyes enough … the more she looks the more the fire grows”, Moorton, 1990, 155 writes, “ Vergil’s suggestion of erotic avidity in the expression is unmistakable”.
[6] Gutting, 2006, 268
[7] Aeneid, Book IV, 20-29
[8] Gutting, 2006 , 271
[9] Aeneid, Book IV, 68
[10] Aeneid, Book IV, 86
[11] Aeneid Book IV, 218, Dido calls her affair a “marriage” to cloak her sense of shame (culpa).
[12] Fratantuono, 2007, 101
[13] Aeneid, book IV, 369-370, “She fears everything now, even with all secure”
[14] Aeneid, book IV, 425-428, Most notably: “ If the fates had left me free to live my life, to arrange my own affairs of my own free will, Troy is the city, first and foremost, that I would safe guard.”
[15] Aeneid, Book IV, 555, Aeneas has become a “sturdy oak,” unmovable in his resolve.
[16] McLeish, 1972, 127
[17] Fratantuono, 2007, 115, points out that for Dido, Aeneas has now become a public enemy (hostis) not just a personal one.
[18] Duckworth, 1956, 358 [my italics]
[19] Bryce, 1974, 258
[20] The Aeneid, Book VI, 545-551

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