Who She Is
Dido, also called Elissa, is the queen who founded Carthage, a city she built on the North African coast. She was born a princess in Tyre, a Phoenician city, and fled her brother Pygmalion, who had killed her husband, Sychaeus, before the altar to seize his gold. She took with her the tyrant's treasure and those who hated or feared him, and founded a new city. She is a ruler who decides, organizes, and welcomes, and who swore fidelity to her dead husband. In the poem, she is the one who receives the shipwrecked Trojans and to whom Aeneas recounts the fall of Troy and the voyage. Two gods, Venus and Juno, make her love Aeneas for opposing interests, and she kills herself when he sets off for Italy by Jupiter's order. She is the most human victim of the founding of Rome: apart from Aeneas himself, who narrates Books II and III, she is the figure to whom the poem gives the most voice in the first half of the work.
Trajectory
In Book I, Dido appears through the story Venus tells Aeneas: widow of Sychaeus, betrayed by her own brother, she fled and founded Carthage. The poem makes a point of showing her first in command, and only afterward in love.
ille Sichaeum / Impius ante aras, atque auri caecus amore, / Clam ferro incautum superat, he, impious and blind with love of gold, slays Sychaeus unawares, secretly, with iron, before the altars.
dux femina facti, a woman leads the enterprise.
When Aeneas's companions, whom he believed dead in the storm, ask for shelter, she welcomes them without hesitation, and, once the mist has lifted, tells Aeneas that she too was cast from land to land. Hospitality is hers, and at the same time it had been prepared by Mercury at Jupiter's command. Venus, fearing that Juno will use Carthage against her son, has Cupid take the form of Ascanius and kindle passion in the queen's lap: Dido's passion is born as a goddess's weapon.
Non ignara mali, miseris succurrere disco., not ignorant of misfortune, I learn to help the unhappy.
Nec non et vario noctem sermone trahebat / Infelix Dido, longumque bibebat amorem, and the unhappy Dido prolonged the night in varied conversation, and drank in a long love.
In Books II and III, Dido barely appears: she is the listener to whom Aeneas addresses the narration of the last night of Troy and of seven years of wandering.
In Book IV, passion, abandonment, and death. The queen does not sleep after the banquet and confesses to her sister Anna that she recognizes in him the traces of the old flame, the only thing that shook her oath to Sychaeus. Anna undoes the oath with practical arguments, and Dido yields. In the cave, during the storm Juno stirred up, she starts calling what she has lived a marriage, and the narrator says that with this name she covers her guilt.
Anna (fatebor enim), miseri post fata Sichaei / Conjugis, et sparsos fraterna caede Penates, / Solus hic inflexit sensus, animusque labantem / Impulit: agnosco veteris vestigia flammae, Anna (I confess it), after the fate of the wretched Sychaeus, my husband, and the Penates scattered by my brother's murder, only this man has swayed my feelings and pushed my wavering spirit: I recognize the traces of the old flame.
Ille dies primus leti primusque malorum / Causa fuit: neque enim specie famave movetur, / Nec jam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem; / Conjugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam, that day was the first cause of death and of evils: for she is no longer moved by appearance or reputation, nor does she now contemplate a furtive love; she calls it marriage, and with this name she covers her guilt.
When Mercury forces Aeneas to leave, Dido discovers the preparations of the fleet before he speaks and confronts him. She demands love, the joined hand, and the death awaiting her, and says that "guest" is the only name of a husband left to her. Aeneas answers that the oracles send him to Italy and that he does not go of his own will. She looks at him sideways, silent, and then insults him: he has no goddess for a mother, he was nursed by tigers. Dido reads his stillness as lack of feeling, and the narrator shows the opposite, an Aeneas who groans within, but she does not see it.
cui me moribundam deseris, hospes? / Hoc solum nomen quoniam de conjuge restat, to whom do you leave me, dying, O guest? Since only this name of husband remains to me.
Nec tibi diva parens, generis nec Dardanus auctor, / Perfide; sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens / Caucasus, Hyrcanaeque admorunt ubera tigres, no goddess is your mother, nor Dardanus the founder of your line, faithless man; the bristling Caucasus bore you among hard crags, and Hyrcanian tigers offered you their teats.
Already resolved to die, but unwilling to leave anything untried, Dido has Anna ask Aeneas only for more time, an easier sea, rest from her grief. He does not yield, and the narrator attributes the refusal to the fates and to a god who stops up his ears. Then she deceives her sister: she says 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. At dawn, seeing the empty harbor, she casts her curse: if Aeneas must reach Italy, let him arrive at war, exiled, far from Iulus, and die without burial. Then she orders the Tyrians eternal hatred of his line and calls upon an avenger born from her bones.
Tum vos, o Tyrii, stirpem et genus omne futurum / Exercete odiis, cinerique haec mittite nostro / Munera: nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto. / Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor, / Qui face Dardanios ferroque sequare colonos. / Nunc, olim, quocumque dabunt se tempore vires, / Littora littoribus contraria, fluctibus undas / Imprecor, arma armis: pugnent ipsique nepotes, then you, Tyrians, torment with hatred their line and every generation to come, and send these offerings to my ashes: let there be no love or treaties between the peoples. Let some avenger rise from my bones, who will pursue the Dardanian colonists with torch and sword, now, later, whenever at any time their strength is offered: I curse them, shore against shore, waves against waves, weapons against weapons: let the grandsons fight too.
On the pyre, before the clothes and the bed, Dido takes stock of her life before striking herself with the Trojan sword: 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 of her death. The narrator explains that she did not die by fate nor by deserved death, but before her time, in a sudden frenzy; for this reason Juno sends Iris to cut the lock that was still missing, to release the life.
Dulces exuviae, dum fata deusque sinebant, / Accipite hanc animam, meque his exsolvite curis. / Vixi, et quem dederat cursum fortuna peregi: / Et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago. / Urbem praeclaram statui; mea moenia vidi; / Ulta virum, poenas inimico a fratre recepi; / Felix, heu! nimium felix, si littora tantum / Nunquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae!, sweet relics, while the fates and the god allowed, receive this soul and free me from these cares. I have lived, and I have run the course that fortune gave me: and now my great shade will go beneath the earth. I founded a glorious city; I saw my walls; I avenged my husband and exacted the penalty from my enemy brother; happy, alas, too happy, if only the Dardanian keels had never touched our shore!
Nam, quia nec fato, merita nec morte peribat, / Sed misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore, / Nondum illi flavum Proserpina vertice crinem / Abstulerat, Stygioque caput damnaverat Orco, for since she was perishing neither by fate nor by deserved death, but wretched and before her day, kindled by sudden fury, Proserpina had not yet taken the golden lock from her head, nor condemned her life to the Stygian Orcus.
In Book V, Aeneas is already on the open sea when he sees the walls of Carthage lit by a fire whose cause the Trojans do not know; the reader of Book IV knows it is the pyre, and the Trojans sense what a woman wounded by love can do.
In Book VI, in the Fields of Mourning, where those consumed by love dwell, Aeneas meets Dido's shade again, swears he left against his will, and is met with silence: she keeps her eyes on the ground, flees to the grove, and returns to Sychaeus, who matches her love. The poem does not say whether the silence is a refusal of the excuse or the end of a conversation that no longer interests her.
Funeris heu tibi causa fui! Per sidera juro, / Per Superos, et si qua fides tellure sub ima est, / Invitus, regina, tuo de littore cessi, alas, I was the cause of your death! I swear by the stars, by the gods above, and by whatever faith there is beneath the deep earth: against my will, O queen, I left your shore
Illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat; / Nec magis incepto vultum sermone movetur, / Quam si dura silex aut stet Marpesia cautes. / Tandem proripuit sese, atque inimica refugit / In nemus umbriferum, conjux ubi pristinus illi / Respondet curis, aequatque Sichaeus amorem, turned away, she kept her eyes fixed on the ground, and her face is no more moved by the conversation begun than if it were hard flint or a Marpesian crag. At last she tore herself away and fled, hostile, into the shady grove, where her former husband answers her cares and Sychaeus matches her love.
Themes Embodied
Dido embodies Passion, but not as a weakness of her own: the fire that consumes her is armed by Venus and Juno, and the poem asks how much of the choice was hers. For this reason she also embodies Fate and free will: the oracle and Mercury lead Aeneas to Italy, and she is crushed by the machinery of a fate that is not her own. She embodies Duty, in two sides that do not fit together: her fidelity to Sychaeus, which she breaks when she yields, and Aeneas's obligation to the fates, which he fulfills without giving up Italy. She embodies Empire and colonialism through the price that the founding of Rome exacts from a foreign city, and Home, Exile, and Return, because Dido is, like the Trojans, an exile who founded a new homeland and welcomes whoever passes through the same. The curse she casts links the personal drama to the War between Rome and Carthage: tradition reads in the avenger who will rise from her bones the future Hannibal, and the Punic Wars as the fulfillment of the curse.
That Virgil lingers on Dido, and gives her more voice than Aeneas in the scene of the break-up, is the reason the Aeneid does not work as simple propaganda for empire: the poem shows the cost of the founding instead of hiding it. There are at least four ways of reading the queen, and the poem allows all of them. The sympathetic reading feels her pain and condemns the departure. The functional reading sees Aeneas's Pietas, the duty toward the gods and toward the people, overcoming Dido's hospitality. The historical reading, turned toward Carthage, sees a feminized city destroyed by Rome. The reading contemporary with Augustus sees in Aeneas what avoids the foreign queen from whom Mark Antony did not know how to keep away.
Relationships
- Aeneas: the guest she welcomes and loves, who abandons her by the gods' order, without promising marriage and without giving up Italy.
- Anna: the sister and confidante who persuades her to yield to love and then, without knowing it, raises her own sister's pyre.
- Venus: the goddess who, out of fear of Carthage's hostility, has Dido inflamed.
- Juno: the goddess who arranges the cave to keep Aeneas out of Italy and, at the end, sends Iris to free Dido's soul.
- Ascanius: the boy whose form Cupid takes to kindle passion in the queen's lap.
- Turnus: the other great sacrifice of the poem, in a symmetrical place in the second half.
In Art and in Dante
Dido is one of the figures of the Aeneid most often portrayed after antiquity. In painting, Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland made The Meeting of Dido and Aeneas. In Dante, in Canto V of the Inferno, she is in the second circle, that of the lustful, designated as "colei che s'ancise amorosa," she who killed herself for love, among Cleopatra, Helen, and Paris, swept by the eternal storm: Virgil is Dante's guide and, in that canto, the Dido whom the poet knew is reread through Christian morality.