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Aeneid · Book IV

Dido

PassionFate and Free WillDutyEmpire and Colonialism

Chapter summary

After hearing Aeneas recount the fall of Troy and the voyage, Dido cannot sleep: the courage of her guest and the honor of her lineage consume her like a hidden fire. In the morning she confesses to her sister Anna that he is the first to stir her since Sychaeus, the husband whom her brother, Pygmalion, murdered, but she swears she would rather be swallowed by the earth than violate her modesty. Anna undoes the oath with practical arguments: remaining a widow does not comfort the ashes, the neighboring kings whom Dido refused surround Carthage, and an alliance with the Trojans would make the city grow. Modesty gives way. Dido wanders the city like a doe struck by an arrow, asks again for the story of Troy and, alone at night, holds Ascanius in her lap to deceive her love. The works of the city stop.

Juno sees that fame no longer restrains Dido and proposes to Venus that the two marry and unite the peoples: she wants Aeneas held in Carthage, far from Italy. Venus sees the maneuver but accepts it, because she doubts that Jupiter would allow a single people for the two. During a hunt a storm scatters the companions, and Dido and Aeneas enter the same cave. The narrator says that was the first day of Dido's death: she calls what she lived a marriage, and with that name she covers her guilt.

Fame, a winged monster of eyes, tongues and ears, runs through Libya mixing facts and inventions: the two spend the winter in luxury, forgetful of their kingdoms. The news reaches Iarbas, a neighboring king whom Dido had refused as a husband, and he prays to Jupiter. Jupiter sends Mercury down: Aeneas's mother did not save him for this, and if the glory of Rome does not move him, let him at least think of Ascanius, to whom Italy is owed. Mercury finds him raising the towers of Carthage, with the sword and cloak that Dido gave him, and rebukes him. Aeneas is struck dumb and wants to flee. He decides to have the fleet readied in silence and to look for a moment to speak to Dido, who, he believes, does not imagine an end to so much love.

Dido perceives the plan before he speaks, because Fame tells her the fleet is being armed. She accuses him of wanting to leave in secret, recalls their love and the hand given, says that for his sake she lost her modesty, her reputation and the goodwill of the neighboring peoples, and concludes that “guest” is the only name of husband left to her. Aeneas, with eyes fixed and hiding his pain, answers that he does not deny what she did for him, that he did not plan to flee in secret nor promised marriage, and that, if he could decide, he would rebuild Troy. But the oracle of Apollo sends him to Italy, his father Anchises visits him in dreams, Ascanius loses his kingdom, and Mercury was seen and heard: it is not by his own will that he goes. Dido looks at him sideways, silent, and then explodes: he has no goddess for a mother, he was suckled by tigers. She orders him to follow Italy, promises to pursue him as a shadow after she is dead, and faints. Aeneas groans, shaken by great love, but he carries out the orders of the gods.

The Trojans drag their ships into the sea in an ant-like hurry. Dido, from the tower, sees the shore in festivity and, already resolved to die but unwilling to leave anything untried, sends Anna to ask Aeneas only for time, a better wind and rest for her grief. Aeneas does not give way: the fates prevent it, and a god stops up his ears.

Dido seeks death. She sees the wine of the libations turn to blood, and dreams that she walks alone. Resolved, she tells Anna, with a serene face, that a priestess taught her a rite to bring him back or to free her from love, and orders a pyre raised in the courtyard with his arms, his clothes and his bed. Anna, who thinks only of mourning, obeys. At night Dido weighs her ways out: to ask again for the suitors she scorned, to go with the Trojans, to drag the Tyrians to the sea. She discards each for a reason: the suitors she has already refused, the Trojans are a people of perjury and may not even receive her, the Tyrians she barely tore from Sidon. She concludes that she must die.

On the stern, Aeneas sleeps, ready to leave, when Mercury returns and warns him: Dido is plotting a crime, she is certain to die, and at dawn the fire will reach the harbor. Aeneas wakes in terror, cuts the cables, and the fleet rows out.

At dawn Dido sees the harbor empty, beats her breast, tears her hair, and orders the ships pursued and burned, but soon asks herself what madness this is. She invokes the Sun, Juno, Hecate and the Furies: if he is to reach Italy, let him arrive in war, exiled, far from Iulus, and die without burial. Then she orders the Tyrians eternal hatred for his line and calls for an avenger to rise from her bones.

Dido climbs the pyre and draws the Trojan sword. Seeing the clothes and the bed, she pauses, weeps, lies down and speaks her last words: she founded the city, avenged her husband, and would have been too happy if the Trojan ships had never touched her shore. She asks that Aeneas, from the sea, see the fire and carry the omen away. Anna arrives, tears at her face and accuses her sister of having deceived her: she wanted to die with her. Juno, moved by pity for the agony, sends Iris to cut the lock of hair that Proserpina had not yet cut, and life dissolves into the winds.

Analysis

The book sets two loyalties against each other that do not fit together: Dido's loyalty to Sychaeus, which she breaks when she yields, and Aeneas's loyalty to destiny, which he fulfills without giving up Italy. Neither of them is a clean villain. Dido is wounded by a fire that two gods kindle, Venus and Juno, and Aeneas is the man whom Mercury must wake by force and who, even so, groans. The poem does not absolve him out of indifference; it makes him pay the price. The same material can be read against him: loyalty to destiny appears only after Mercury's rebuke, and his reply sounds like a late excuse, which readers have debated for centuries.

Almost none of the romance is staged. In this book Dido and Aeneas do not exchange a single word of love: the only direct dialogue is that of the rupture, and only the separation gains a voice. Dido founds Carthage with public speech, laws and sacrifices, as Book I: The Storm and Carthage shows, and Aeneas undoes the bond in a private, short dialogue, without a witness. It is the poorer word that wins. In Book VI: The Descent to the Underworld he will meet Dido's shadow again, and she will say nothing to him.

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