In book four, we get a chance to get close
in to the character of Dido. We learn about her in detail, we see a
rich, psychological portrait of her, her interaction with Aeneas, her interaction
with her sister Ana, the, complexity of Dido's character makes her quite a strong
figure. In fact, I think she's probably the most
complex character of these opening books more so than even Aeneas.
She is sympathetic. We get to know a lot about her we've seen
her already being a pretty good person. She welcomes in Aeneas and his men, she
shows them hospitality, and the way that we know from.
In the ancient Mediterranean, it's a good thing to do.
She's building a city, something Aeneas can admire she seems to be doing
everything right. In Book one, we show through no fault of
her own, the Goddess Venus sneaks up on her and gets her to fall in love with,
with Aeneas, through the intervention of Amour, her son.
So, she's sort of portrayed in that, in that sense as, as not fully in control,
but we can understand how she is overcome by divine intervention.
But she is a, a, a someone who's. Tale is not gonna lead to happiness and
friendliness. In fact, quite the opposite.
This sympathetic character, Virgil spent a lot of time watching get ground up by the
machinery that's leading toward the founding of Rome.
We were talking last time about how all these teleological currents are married,
wedded to ideas that are pushing backward along the way.
It's not a simple movement to the future there's great suffering to be paid on the
way and Dido gives us a, a way of focusing in on one specific scene of this book four
is the richest portrayal of what, she goes through.
Starts off as we see a hunt, happen. Aeneas and Dido and their, their, parties,
head out for a hunt into the wilderness. And low and behold, wouldn't you know it.
A storm. Breaks and Aeneas and Dido find themselves
taking shelter in the cave. The two of them, they're have an interlude
that an Virgil describes in really interesting language.
So let's have a look at what the passage is, Now to the self same cave came Dido
and the captain of the Trojans. Primal Earth herself and Nuptial Juno
opened the ritual. Torches of lightning blazed.
High heaven became witness to the marriage.
And nymphs cried out wild hymns from a mountaintop.
That day was the first cause of death and first of sorrow.
Dido had no further qualms as to impressions given and set abroad and
thought no longer of a secret love but called it marriage.
Thus, after that name, she hid her fault. Now, what's Virgil given us in this,
passage? Notice what, what we have.
We have, to the self-same cave came Dido and the captain of the Trojans, primal
earth herself and nuptial Juno opened the ritual.
To invoke earth and Juno here is to invoke the two goddesses that have.
A great deal to do with marriage ceremonies.
So we're talking about a specific kind of marriage that's being, the episode here is
being cast as an actual bona fide marriage, with the two of them, keeping an
eye out for it. Virgil calls it a ritual.
We've got torches of lightning blazing. Marriage ceremonies are marked by torches.
To talk about oh, torches is, is already to invoke a very strongly ritual context
of marriage. And we've got lightening flashing around
the cave that's taking the role of these torches.
High heaven became witness to the marriage.
There's Virgil telling us that what's happening in the cave is an actual
marriage. The nymphs cry out wild hymns from the
mountaintop. Well, that's also supposed to go on during
a marriage, with nymphs moving around and wild songs that get sung.
Then Virgil takes a turn. Look what happens in his description of
the event. That day was the first cause of death, and
first of sorrow, Dido had no further qualms as to impressions given and set
abroad. She's thought no longer of a secret love,
but called it marriage, thus under that name she hid her fault.
The first half of the passage seems pretty clearly that.
Virgil is telling us, yeah, there was a marriage that happened in that cave.
The second half of the passage is Virgil telling us, no, it wasn't a marriage.
Now, which Virgil do we believe? It's actually quite hard to decide.
Did what happened in the cave count as a marriage, or did it not?
Now, Roman legal precedents on such, matters are not totally clear.
It's not absolutely transparent what was supposed to have happened there.
In fact, it's quite murky what happened there.
Does Aeneas owe some affiliation and allegiance now to Dido?
Well, it's. Tough to say.
Dido surely thinks he does and he in the end thinks that he doesn't.
Aeneas comes right, or Mercury comes right along and says to Aeneas, you've got to
go, run away. Time for you to get out of here.
Aeneas is ready to sneak away, shows up on pages 105 and 106 and when he's caught he
seems almost a little bit guilty on 490 to 500 in the Fitzgerald translation.
He's, when he's caught he quickly blames fate: I don't want to leave but I had to
leave. It's this.
Destiny that's pulling me forward. There's nothing I can do to escape it.
Dido will have none of this she is absolutely over the top, angry with Aeneas
and his, the murkiness around the presentation of the episode such as Virgil
includes, makes the clarity of her anger I think in the story even more fathomable.
We see the one person here that seems to know what happened.
It's not Aeneas. It doesn't really seem to be Virgil.
The one person that seems to know what happened is Dido.
And the strength of her reaction is really something to be.
Taken away. We see this, a wonderful mural behind me
from, a frieze from, a mural from Pompeii that depicts, depicts stages in the lives
of women. A wonderfully rich, setting for us to have
our conversation. Dido and Aeneas having their marriage,
it's not exactly clear what's supposed to have happened there.
When Aeneas is caught he gives this, quick saying, so please no more of these appeals
that set us both afire. I sail for Italy not of my own free will.
Aeneas is going to have to move forward because destiny is pulling him there.
The speaking of a, The, the, the, as the story unfolds
between Anna and Dido and the nastiness that they start to feel towards Aeneas
page 113 we have a suggestion of a magical rite of burning Aeneas' stuff, things that
come from Aeneas. Love magic is a very common thing in
antiquity, and this would have been understood through that lens.
Magic was not something you would've been proud of doing, it was something you would
have done if you felt in desperate need for it and that, that, that.
Dido was reaching to this direction, seems understandable.
Page 114 we start to call on underworld divinities Iarbas, Chaos, the Chasm,
Hecate, Diana. These are gods and goddess that you reach
out to when really need help. Remember these are iconic divinities from
older order of things, that are also associated with magic, that Dido was
appealing to. Then again, quite, its quite an
understandable state that you find yourself in, in, in great, in great
distress. Now, when I read this scene of Dido I
always have a different feelings toward it from year to year.
It's as though when I'm reading Homer I can feel like, okay.
I put one extra brick in the edifice of my knowledge of Homer each time I read it I
learn a little something here and I learn a little something there and I kind of
build a wall up of knowledge as time goes by.
When I read Virgil I feel like, reading these important scenes, every time I read
it the whole wall moves. And I think this case of Dido is one of
those especially rich ones where it's really hard to make a final statement on
how we're supposed to read this episode of Dido.
Let me just give you a couple of examples of different strong feelings I've had
strong interpretations I've had of this of this scene.
And, none of these do I think is the absolute be all and end all.
Let just present several different readings.
First of all, the sympathetic one, The one I've been presenting pretty much
so far were really brought through her version of events here.
We see, feel sorry for her, I think. This makes her tale and instance of these
back currents that Virgil spends time on. So rather than just focusing on the
destiny that's leading us forward, we see all the suffering that has to be made to
make it things happen. In a good way.
It makes us, I think, quite sympathetic with Dido and feel her pain in a way, and
watch, a, be, the awfulness that comes her direction, get paid out in, things that
she doesn't quite seem to deserve. But, then part of me wants to jump in and
say, wait a minute there are a couple of other possible readings we can do here,
how about for example a functionalist reading.
What if we examined here, what kind of social values are being underwritten,
Are being legitimized by the telling of the tale?
Well, we've got a pretty clear example here of the overriding virtue of Pietas
being made to be shown triumphant in this situation.
Even if Aeneas would have wanted to stay with Dido he couldn't.
Pietas' duty requires that he go forward and even though it's at great cost this
Pietas is the central anchoring virtue of this culture and therefore it must be
fulfilled. So,
Functionalism, A functionalist reading here would
underscore that the value being legitimized is Pietas.
Irrespective of the cost, we still have to do it.
Furthermore, and in support of this reading, remember at the very beginning,
Dido shows herself as someone who is very clearly exhibiting a traditional virtue of
Xenia. She's welcoming, she's welcoming, Aeneas
and his crew, giving them a home. Offering to marry him.
You can marry our queen. Well, marry me.
You can have a kingdom. All these things are being exhibited
through Dido's reactions toward, Toward, toward Aeneas.
Well what Aeneas does in the end is say, Xenia is all well and good and that might
have made sense in the home maritime, but it's Pietas now that's the central virtue,
and we have to anchor that. So in this functionalist duel Pietas wins
out over Xenia. I think a really interesting way of
looking at how this thing might be working here.
Another way of thinking about this puts it in a richer historical context
understanding what's happening during Virgil's own time.
Aeneas here shows a master Roman dominating a loved one, Carthage, who
wishes to be with Rome but is eventually destroyed by Rome.
This would map onto a history of the Carthaginian Wars that the Romans would
have known well. Carthage was, of all the cities in the
Mediterranean, the one that most powerfully stood between them and total
domination of. Mediterranean.
The Carthaginians, in real historical periods that the Romans knew well, for
over a hundred years did awful battle and war with the Romans.
In fact, the Romans remembered the Carthaginian conflict, and their ultimate
victory there, as the great ex, exhibition of Roman power and Roman strength.
It showed pietas, duty, fulfillment of your duty to the, the greatest degree
possible. It was the great exhibition of Roman-ness
as they conquered the Carthaginians no matter how awful the suffering was.
They eh, won out over the Carthaginians. Now with that historical background of the
Carthaginian and Punic Wars let's go back and have a look at what's happening here.
Now we have Carthage who's feminized. We've got hyper-masculine Rome, who wins
out over Carthage. Carthage wants nothing more than just to
be loved by Rome, but instead Rome destroys her.
So, as a contemporary Romanite, it's kind of, wow-wow element to this.
As you see the carthogen once again gets crushed.
Looking at another historical component here, let's walk this back, just a little
bit, and, tie it in, on something, that, a piece of contemporary history, that Virgil
would have known very well. Our hero, Aeneas, shuns the clutches of a
North African sex goddess, thereby besting Odysseus, right?
He does not fall for the wiles of that we see Odysseus falling for with these
various kinds of exciting women on strange far away places.
He gets away. He also escapes faults that would have
been on the front of the minds of Romans during.
Virgil's time. What happened in Egypt when a great
general named Anthony fell in love with a North African sex goddess, Cleopatra.
Oh my goodness, Awful things happened and it ripped all of
Rome apart. So if we're trying to imagine, a
sympathetic reading of Dido, we have to run that past what is clearly, obviously
going to be a very un-sympathetic reading of a figure like Cleopatra, coursing
around in the contemporary historical accounts.
So, of course Aeneas leaves behind Dino. He can't fall victim, no matter how
sincere his love is, or her love is, he can't fall victim to that.
If he did, he would be no better, than the people that had caused such awful civil
war in recent history in Roman memory. So all of these things I think are layers
that are built into this story. As I say, I'm not sure which one I would
endorse in the end. Virgil, I don't think, does that for us.
He's not trying to tale, tell some simple tale that has tidy lessons to be drawn.
Instead he's always presenting very complex tales.
Now I don't want that to be an invitation for all of us to say, oh yeah.
Whatever interpretation of Virgil you want to give is okay.
Que sera, sera. I'm okay, you're okay.
Your interpretation's fine. Yours is fine too.
Let's not do that. Instead let's say in order to understand
all the. Complexities,
The different shades of grey in Virgil's text,
We have to double our efforts to read it very closely and work very hard and have
intense conversations back and forth about what's happening.
I'm really interested to see what you all are going to make of this story, in
further discussion that we have. I think there's a tremendous amount, still
to be talked about. I've only just barely scratched the
surface.