(photo: Joe Walker, central Turkey, 2008)
Nothing says Dido like a picture of ruins. The second half of the Aeneid book IV is filled with human emotion in its raw form. There is immense tragedy, culminating in Aeneas' flight across the sea as he looks back to the sight of Dido's pyre. She has killed herself. How did things get this way, and why was this the end which Virgil chose for Dido and Aeneas?
There are lots of threads here. Coming straight out of what might seem like left field, let's look at the whole of the Aeneid in terms of another great attempt to articulate human community: Plato's Republic. If the Aeneid is a particularly Roman vision of human community (Empire), did Virgil learn any lessons from the Greek vision of human community? Aeneas is not exactly a philosopher king, but the ordering of the various elements of Plato's Republic might be seen in the Aeneid. Dido in this sense represents pure passion, even (as we shall see) irrational passion, which if left unchecked is self-destructive. Hence her necessary end is, for Virgil, suicide. It is suicide for the irrational passions to roam unrestricted. Terribly unromantic, but then again, when you think of romance, the image of the stoic Roman generally does not come to mind. Be that as it may and figure what you will. On with the story.
It takes the prayers of King Iarbas, a rejected suitor, to move Jupiter into sending Mercury as a messenger to Aeneas. The divine messenger is faithful to his task: he reproaches Aeneas for his self-interest. Even if Aeneas is still consumed with passion, can he not at least think of his son, "Iulus, to whom the Italian realm, the land of Rome, are due?" (374) We are reminded again of Rome's destiny: to "bring the whole world under law's dominion" (315). This is the vision of Rome: not asian despotism, nor a Greek system of city states, but a law extending over the whole world. This is the high vision of Empire, as it was in the beginning for Virgil. And law must come before passion.
As soon as he receives the god’s message, Aeneas mind begins to work: how can he tell queen Dido? What is the best way to proceed? There must be 50 ways to leave your lover, as Paul Simon once said. Aeneas decides on one which wasn’t on Paul’s list. He comes up with the plan of action: “Get the fleet ready for sea, But quietly…” (393) But a quiet getaway is not in the cards for Aeneas.
Quite soon – for who deceives a woman in love? (403)
Who indeed? What we might call "a scene" ensues: “You even hoped to keep me in the darkAs to this outrage, did you, two faced man/ And slip away in silence? Can our love/ Not hold you, can the pledge we gave not hold you? (417). She even makes reference to “the marriage that we entered on” (432). Aeneas, for his part, admits all the passion, but denies that there was any “marriage”: I never held the torches of a bridegroom/ Never entered upon the pact of marriage”. (467) Aeneas sees that what they had was not, for all its passion, a marriage. We have two very different views of what has happened. In a "burst of rage", Dido even scorns Aeneas' report that a messenger of the gods came to him. (521)
Aeneas seems to wish his own fate were different: "I sail for Italy not of my own free will” (499). Duty and pietas above all else.
Aeneas is now called pious, duty bound Aeneas again (545); Virgil had stopped with those adjectives while Aeneas was, ummm, distracted. He is now once again following the will of Fate. But let's follow Dido: she invokes fateful curses against Aeneas (535), to which every Roman schoolboy would agree and think of Hannibal and the bitter history between Carthage and Rome. Virgil allows us to see her "broken in mind by suffering" with a "fatal madness and resolved to die" (656). Even after Aeneas has begun his departure, she still invokes the term "marriage", and even blames her sister Anna for encouraging her in this passion, claiming to Anna that "[you] thrust me on my enemy" (763). We see the madness enveloping Dido:
And flung the pieces on the sea? His company
Even Ascanius could I not have minced
And served up to his father at a feast? (833)
Dido's passion is her private Trojan horse. The earlier chapter on the fall of Troy didn't just tell a great part of the history. It also gave us an image by which we could understand what is happening to Dido. Once the horse was inside the city, old Troy was doomed. And so with Dido's passion - it destroyed her from the inside out.
"Her body's warmth fell into dissolution/ And out into the winds her life withdrew." (977)
Next: Roman games. If the Greeks and Romans ran the Beijing Olympics, what would be different?
See the entire post series on Virgil's Aeneid here.
Interesting,
That is a beautiful picture, i dont know much about dido, but this has inspired me to do more research,
Thanks for writing about it
Posted by: Web developers | January 05, 2010 at 05:58 AM