From laughter we come to tragedy, from joy to tears. For in the Aeneid’s story of Aeneas and Dido, readers encounter one of the best and worst love stories the ancient world has to offer. Faced with the choice of human love, or divine will, Dido chooses love, while Aeneas—the epic’s hero in the most unfortunate sense of the term—chooses as the tamers of the Song of Songs would have readers choose, and as Augustus would have Rome choose. Pius Aeneas chooses obedience to the will and law of the gods, and Dido is destroyed.
Having escaped from burning Troy, Aeneas and his brave but bedraggled followers have landed at Carthage, on the North African coast. In part, the story of Aeneas’ devastation of Dido is a poeticizing of the military relations between Rome and Carthage in a later era, when after many battles, Carthage is razed to the ground by Rome, never to rise again. But in the time of the Aeneid, such conflict is a thousand years in the future: Carthage is rising, founded by exiles from Tyre who fled violence and bloodshed at home. Aeneas, an exile from the Trojan war, is in need of mercy. Dido gives it. Perhaps she shouldn’t have.
Aeneas is the perfect hero for an empire busy tightening its grip at home while seeking to expand its reach abroad. The Aeneid is written during the early, expansionist portion of Augustus’ time as emperor, approximately 29–19 BCE, when “campaigning was virtually continuous in western and southern Europe”.111 Unlike the later Ovid, who ridicules the puritanism of Augustus, Virgil flatters the emperor by creating a proto-Roman hero whose prime virtue is obedience.112 Aeneas is not passionless, at least where love and sex are concerned, but he prefers to direct his strength, his emotions, his eros toward mourning for the loss of Troy and founding a new city
111 David Shotter. Rome and Her Empire (New York: Routledge, 2014), 218.
112 There is, in Virgil’s portrayal of Aeneas, very little of the spirit with which he had once infused his character Gallus (based on his contemporary and friend Gaius Cornelius Gallus), for whom “Love conquers all; and we must yield to love”
(“Omnia vincit amor; et nos cedamus Amori”) (Eclogue 10.69. In Virgil, 2 vols, ed. by H. Rushton Fairclough [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960], 74).
for his descendants and those of the men who follow him. His cry,
“Oh fatherland! Troy, home of the gods!”113 has far more passion and pathos than does his recounting of the loss of his wife in the final battle at Troy. Escaping with his family, Aeneas sees to the safety of his father and son, but leaves his wife, Creusa, vulnerable:
ergo age, care pater, cervici imponere nostrae;
ipse subibo umeris nec me labor iste gravabit;
quo res cumque cadent, unum et commune periclum, una salus ambobus erit. mihi parvus Iulus
sit comes, et longe servet vestigia coniunx.114
Come then, dear father, upon my neck;
this task will not be too heavy for my shoulders;
However things may fall, we two have one common peril, and we will have one salvation. My little Iulus
come with me, and at a distance let my wife follow our steps.
Having his wife follow at a distance leads to the predictable result;
Creusa is lost in the battle, killed by the Greeks:
heu misero coniunx fatone erepta Creusa substitit, erravitne via seu lapsa resedit, incertum; nec post oculis est reddita nostris.
nec prius amissam respexi animumue reflexi quam tumulum antiquae Cereris sedemque sacratam venimus: hic demum collectis omnibus una
defuit, et comites natumque virumque fefellit.115
Ah, wretched fate snatched Creusa.
Did she stop for a while, lose the way, or slip and fall back?
I am not certain; nor afterwards was she returned to our eyes.
113 “O patria, o divum domus Ilium” 2.241. All references are from The Aeneid. In Virgil, 2 vols, ed. by H. Rushton Fairclough (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1960).
114 Ibid., 2.707–11.
115 Ibid., 2.738–44.
Neither did I turn my mind or thought toward my lost one until to the ancient Ceres’ hallowed home
we came; when all were gathered, she alone was absent, lost to her son and her husband.
He does not lack emotion when describing her loss, even claiming that he went back into the battle zone trying to find her, crying out her name as he “rushed furiously and endlessly from house to house through the city”.116 However, the telling detail is that during the initial escape, he never gave her any thought, and only realized that his wife was missing after he had brought father and son to safety.
Aeneas is no Odysseus. Odysseus, even amid his serial philandering and flirting with witches, goddesses, and the daughters of kings, still longs to be reunited with Penelope, whom the goddess Calypso describes as “your wife, she that you ever long for daily, in every way”,117 and for whom “he cried out, still calling forth tears, / Crying as he held his beloved, trustworthy, and strong-minded wife”.118 It appears the feelings were mutual. From Penelope’s point of view, theirs was a reunion of joy and passion: “Hers and her husband’s tears mingle, her knees melt (that sure sign of Aphrodite’s presence), [and] she proceeds formally to their bed with him, led by a maid with torches, as though to renew the days of their beginnings”.119 But far from pining for his wife, Aeneas can barely be bothered to remember her even as they are trying to escape from burning Troy. Later, he gives her no more thought while falling in “love” (or lust) with Dido than he gives Dido after issuing the orders to sail away from Carthage.
116 “quaerenti et tectis urbis sine fine furenti” (ibid., 2.771).
117 “σὴν ἄλοχον, τῆς τ᾽ αἰὲν ἐέλδεαι ἤματα πάντα” (Homer. Odyssey, 5.210. Vol. I:
Books 1–12, ed. by A. T. Murray [Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919]).
118 “ὣς φάτο, τῷ δ᾿ ἔτι μᾶλλον ὑφ᾿ ἵμερον ὦρσε γόοιο· / κλαῖε δ᾿ ἔχων ἄλοχον θυμαρέα, κεδνὰ ἰδυῖαν” (Homer. Odyssey, 23.231–32. Vol. II: Books 13–24, ed. by A. T. Murray).
119 Jean H. Hagstrum. Esteem Enlivened by Desire: The Couple from Homer to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 58.
Dido and Aeneas. Ancient Roman fresco (10 BC–45 AC). Pompeii, Italy.120
The love story between the two is mostly one-sided, primarily on Dido’s part. The deck is strangely stacked against her, as well. She falls in love unwillingly, forced by the gods to play the role that will destroy her, despite the fact that Juno regards Dido as dying an undeserved death.
The gods—as is their usual course in Homer, Virgil, and most Greek and Roman mythology—play with human beings like chess pieces on a grand game board. Dido’s passion comes over her against her will as part of an ongoing struggle between Juno and Venus that dates all the way back to the famous judgment of Paris, that Venus was more beautiful than Juno.
Dido is not a tragic figure in the later Senecan model, whose wounds are often self-inflicted. No, Dido, like so many tragic figures from the earlier Greek tradition of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, is made a victim by the gods as they play out their petty rivalries on the human stage, with mortals as their unwitting proxies. Dido is caught, as Hamlet would say, between “the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites”:121 Juno, who opposed Troy and opposes the founding of Rome, and Venus, who aids her son Aeneas wherever and whenever possible. Venus sends Cupid, in the guise of Aeneas’ son, to pierce Dido’s heart with the first fatal pangs of love for Aeneas:
120 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Affreschi_romani_-_Enea_e_didone_-_
pompei.JPG 121 Hamlet, 5.2.60–61.
Tu faciem illius noctem non amplius unam falle dolo, et notos pueri puer indue voltus, ut, cum te gremio accipiet laetissima Dido regalis inter mensas laticemque Lyaeum, cum dabit amplexus atque oscula dulcia figet, occultum inspires ignem fallasque veneno.122
Do you, just for this one night,
imitate his form, and boy as you are, take his familiar face, so that, when Dido takes you into her lap
amidst the royal tables and flowing wine, and she embraces you and kisses you sweetly, breathe into her a hidden fire and secretly poison her.
The famous night that Aeneas and Dido spend in a cave while taking shelter from a rainstorm, the night of their first lovemaking, is arranged as a trap by the dueling goddesses, Juno and Venus. As Juno designs it:
venatum Aeneas unaque miserrima Dido in nemus ire parant, ubi primos crastinus ortus extulerit Titan radiisque retexerit orbem.
his ego nigrantem commixta grandine nimbum, dum trepidant alae saltusque indagine cingunt, desuper infundam et tonitru caelum omne ciebo.
diffugient comites et nocte tegentur opaca:
speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem devenient. adero et, tua si mihi certa voluntas, conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo.
hic hymenaeus erit.123
Aeneas and unhappy Dido, as one
prepare to go hunting in the woods, where the first risings Of brilliant Titan will have raised his rays, lighting the world.
I shall pour on them a black storm mixed with hail, whilst the hunters run back and forth with their nets, from above I will shake the whole sky with thunder.
122 The Aeneid, 1.683–88.
123 Ibid., 4.117–27.
The comrades will scatter and be covered with opaque night:
into a cave will Dido and the Trojan chief vanish. I will be present, and, if your will is firm, in a stable and proper marriage and wedlock, this will be a wedding.
Once word spreads of the love affair, as “Rumor runs through Libya’s great cities”,124 the common people, King Iarbus (long a suitor for Dido’s love), and the poem itself turn against the idea of the “marriage” into which Juno has bound the pair. The people’s talk turns sour and critical, turning the night in the cave into something sordid and “shameful”:
venisse Aenean Troiano sanguine cretum, cui se pulchra viro dignetur iungere Dido;
nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fovere regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos.
haec passim dea foeda virum diffundit in ora.125
Aeneas is come, born of Trojan blood,
with whom in marriage fair Dido deigns to join;
now, between them, in luxury they waste the length of winter, reigning heedlessly, enthralled by shameful desire.
These tales the foul goddess spreads through men’s mouths.
Soon enough (too soon, from Dido’s perspective), Jove orders Aeneas to leave Carthage and sail across the Mediterranean in search of the shores where he will lay the foundations for the “kingdom of Italy and Rome”.126 Immediately, Aeneas “burns to depart in flight, and relinquish that pleasant land”,127 strategizing not how to leave, but how to make his excuses to Dido: “Ah, what could he do? What can he dare say now to the furious queen / to pacify her? What opening speech could he use?”128 Aeneas is more concerned with how to manipulate Dido into approving of his sudden plan than he is with the effect his leaving will have on her.
124 “Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes” (ibid., 4.173).
125 Ibid., 4.191–95.
126 “regnum Italae Romanaque” (ibid., 4.275).
127 “ardet abire fuga dulcisque relinquere terras” (ibid., 4.348).
128 “heu quid agat? quo nunc reginam ambire furentem / audeat adfatu? quae prima exordia sumat?” (ibid., 4.283–84).
As with Creusa, he never looks back, and she does not cross his mind, except as an immovable anchor he must cut loose and pull away from.
The confrontation between them is heartbreaking and baffling to Dido, but merely embarrassing for Aeneas, whose eyes are now solely fixed on his dearly-beloved gods as he seeks to navigate the awkward final moments of his time with yet another woman he will leave behind on his journey. Dido begs him, uselessly, not to go:
mene fugis? per ego has lacrimas dextramque tuam te (quando aliud mihi iam miserae nihil ipsa reliqui), per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos, si bene quid de te merui, fuit aut tibi quicquam dulce meum, miserere domus labentis et istam, oro, si quis adhuc precibus locus, exue mentem.129
You’re running from me? By these tears and by your hand, (since there is nothing else for my miserable self),
through our marriage, by the way our wedding took place, if I have deserved well of you, or if there was anything sweet about me, have mercy on a falling house, and yet, I pray you, if there is room for prayers, change your mind.
But Aeneas, possessed by an immovable determination to obey the very gods who have so long betrayed him and his beloved Troy, gives an answer that sounds like little more than the It’s not you, it’s me cliché of innumerable modern breakup scenes:
ego te, quae plurima fando
enumerare vales, numquam, regina, negabo promeritam, nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus.
[…]
sed nunc Italiam magnam Gryneus Apollo, Italiam Lyciae iussere capessere sortes;
hic amor, haec patria est.
[…]
129 Ibid., 4.314–19.
desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis;
Italiam non sponte sequor.130
I will, because of many things which
you are able to recount, never, queen, deny that you are deserving, nor shall I regret my memory of Dido
while I am mindful of myself, while breath reigns in this body.
[…]
But now of great Italy has Grynean Apollo spoken, Italy, his Lycian lots order me to take hold of;
this must be my love, this my fatherland.
[…]
Stop inflaming both of us with your complaints;
I do not go to Italy of my own free will.
Virgil works especially hard here to make Aeneas sympathetic, despite the fact that such a move comes at the cost of making him seem weak and dishonest, denying the fact that he chooses to obey power—as he once did with Priam, and as he now does with Jove. He is at pains to deny that his relationship with Dido is a marriage—“I never held out the conjugal torch, / nor ever pretended to such a contract”131—despite the fact that Juno calls it a marriage from the very beginning. Virgil is so eager to excuse Aeneas, in fact, that his poem blames Dido for impropriety in getting involved in a relationship arranged by the gods who call the action “marriage” (this, in a Rome in which Augustus Caesar is legislating private relationships):
pronuba Iuno
dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscius aether conubiis summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae.
ille dies primus leti primusque malorum causa fuit; neque enim specie famave movetur nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem:
coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam.132
130 Ibid., 4.333–37, 345–47, 359–60.
131 “nec coniugis umquam / praetendi taedas aut haec in foedera veni” (ibid., 4.422–23).
132 Ibid., 4.166–72.
Nuptial Juno
gave the signal; fires flashed in the heavens
witnessing the marriage, as Nymphs howl from the peaks.
That day was the first of death and evil,
the cause of woe; no longer does reputation concern her, nor does Dido dream of a secret love:
she calls it marriage, and in this name covers her guilt.
Any guilt that Dido feels may come from her feeling that she has somehow betrayed the memory of Sychaeus, her long-dead husband, by falling in love with Aeneas:
agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.
sed mihi vel tellus optem prius ima dehiscat […]
ante, pudor, quam te violo aut tua iura resolvo.133
I recognize the vestiges of the old flame.
But may the earth open for me to its depths […]
before, Shame, I violate you or break your law.
But guilt aside, it is not only Dido that calls the relationship between herself and Aeneas a marriage. In this case, Aeneas, always so ready to align himself with the will of the gods, denies what the gods affirm.
According to Macrobius (c. 400 CE), Virgil puts Dido into a completely untenable position, violently transforming a figure of legendary faithfulness into the passionate victim of love he portrays in the Aeneid:
[Virgil] imitated whatever, and wherever he found; so that the fourth book of the Argonautica by Apollonius served as the model for his fourth book of the Aeneid, upon which he almost entirely formed the tale of Dido and Aeneas’ love on the wildly incontinent passion Medea bore for Jason. [Virgil] so elegantly arranged this that his account of a lustful Dido, which he and all the world knows is false, has for many centuries maintained the appearance of truth.134
133 Ibid., 4.23–24, 27.
134 [Virgil] quidquid ubicumque invenit imitandum; adeo ut de Argonauticorum quarto, quorum scriptor est Apollonius, librum Aeneidos suae quartum totum paene formaverit, ad Didonem vel Aenean amatoriam incontinentiam Medeae circa Iasonem trasferendo. quod ita elegantius
There is a split tradition about Dido, a pre-Virgilian tradition “that represents her only as a leader”135 and a post-Virgilian account in which she has been turned into a victim of passion. In the earlier tradition,
“preserved among the fragments attributed to the Greek historian Timaeus of Tauromenium (ca. 356–260 BCE)” Dido is no one’s victim, but “is a heroic figure [whose] suicide is an act of defiance that testifies to the nobility of her nature”.136 In this story, Dido dies in order to avoid dishonor to herself and Carthage:
With the success of the opulent wealth of Carthage, Hiarbas of the Maxitani summoned ten African leaders in order to claim [Dido] in marriage under threat of war. The deputies, fearing to report this to the queen of the Carthaginians, acted falsely towards her with the news that the king asked for and awaited one who could teach he and his and Africans together a more cultured life; but who could be found, who would wish to leave his relations and cross over to live among the barbarians and wild beasts? Then, castigated by the queen, in case they refused a hard life for the salvation of the rest of the country, to which, if necessary, their life itself was owed, they disclosed the king’s message, saying that she will have to act according to the precepts she gives to others, if she wishes to her city to have security. Taken by this deceit, in the name of Acerbas she called, for a long time and with many tears and piteous wailings. At last she replies that she will go where the fate of her city has summoned her. Taking three months, pyres were built in the outer quarter of the city, and many victims mounted and were consumed by the fires, as if she would placate the ghost of her husband, and make her offerings to him before the wedding; then with a sword she mounted the pyre, and looking at the people, said that she would go to her husband just as she was instructed, and ended her life with the sword.137
auctore digessit, ut fabula lascivientis Didonis, quam falsam novit universitas, per tot tamen saecula speciem veritatis.
Macrobius. Saturnalia, Books 3–5, ed. by Robert A. Kaster (Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 408.
135 Marilynn Desmond. Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and Medieval Aeneid (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 24.
136 Ibid.
137 Cum successu rerum florentes Karthaginis opes essent, rex Maxitanorum Hiarbas decem
137 Cum successu rerum florentes Karthaginis opes essent, rex Maxitanorum Hiarbas decem