What It Is
Dido's Pyre is the bonfire that the queen of Carthage has built in the palace courtyard after Aeneas decides to leave, and on which she dies. Dido presents it to her sister Anna as the rite of a priestess to bring him back or to free her from love, and has his weapons, clothes, and bed placed on it. Anna, who thinks only of mourning, obeys. The pyre is at once a trick, an altar, a bed, and a tomb, and it is the object that joins love, curse, and the queen's death.
Where It Appears
The fire comes before the pyre. In Book I, Venus decides to catch the queen by cunning and surround her with fire to protect her son:
Quocirca capere ante dolis et cingere flamma / Reginam meditor, for this reason I am planning to take the queen first by cunning and surround her with fire.
Book IV opens with Dido already consumed by him:
At regina, gravi jamdudum saucia cura, / Vulnus alit venis, et caeco carpitur igni, but the queen, long wounded by heavy anguish, feeds the wound in her veins and is consumed by a blind fire.
When the fleet prepares to sail, Dido asks Anna to obtain from Aeneas one last delay, and the refusal is attributed to the fates and to a god. She asks for death, sees the wine of the libations turn to blood, and, resolved, has the pyre built with the story she told Anna. On the morning the harbor is seen empty, she invokes the Sun, Juno, Hecate, and the Furies and launches the curse that is born of that fire:
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, and you, O Tyrians, torment with hatreds his line and the whole future race, and send these gifts to my ashes: let there be no love nor treaties between the peoples. Let some avenger arise from my bones, who will pursue the Dardanian settlers with torch and iron, now, later, at whatever time strength is given: I pray in a curse that shores be against shores, waves against waves, arms against arms: let the grandchildren fight as well.
Then she climbs the pyre and draws the Trojan sword. Before the clothes and the bed she stops, weeps, lies down, and takes stock of her 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 it, receive this life and free me from these cares. I have lived, and I have completed 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 ships had never touched our shore!
Before wounding herself, she asks that the Trojan see the fire from the sea and carry away the omen of her death:
Moriemur inultae! / Sed moriamur, ait: sic, sic juvat ire sub umbras. / Hauriat hunc oculis ignem crudelis ab alto / Dardanus, et nostrae secum ferat omina mortis, we will die unavenged! But let us die, she says: thus, thus it pleases me to go down into the shades. Let the cruel Dardanian drink in this fire with his eyes from the high sea, and carry with him the omens of our death.
Anna arrives, tears her face, and accuses her sister of deceiving her, because Dido wanted to die with her and because she raised the pyre with her own hands without knowing it:
eadem me ad fata vocasses: / Idem ambas ferro dolor atque eadem hora tulisset. / His etiam struxi manibus, patriosque vocavi / Voce deos, sic te ut posita, crudelis, abessem? / Exstinxti te meque, soror, populumque, patresque / Sidonios, urbemque tuam, you would have called me to the same fate: the same grief and the same hour would have carried us both away by the sword. With these hands I built the pyre, and with my voice I called on the gods of our homeland, so that, you lying there, cruel one, I might be absent? You have destroyed yourself and me, sister, and the people, the Sidonian senators, and your city.
Juno, pitying the long agony, sends Iris to cut the lock of hair that Proserpina had not yet cut, and Dido's life dissolves into the winds.
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 a merited death, but wretched before her day and kindled by sudden fury, Proserpina had not yet taken the golden lock from her head, nor condemned her life to Stygian Orcus.
In Book V, the pyre is seen from afar. Aeneas sails looking back at the walls of Carthage, which already gleam with Dido's flames, and the Trojans, who do not know the cause of the fire, read in it an ill omen:
Certus iter, fluctusque atros Aquilone secabat, / Moenia respiciens, quae jam infelicis Elisae / Collucent flammis. Quae tantum accenderit ignem, / Causa latet; duri magno sed amore dolores / Polluto, notumque furens quid femina possit, / Triste per augurium Teucrorum pectora ducunt., set on his course, he was cutting the dark waves with the north wind, looking back at the walls that already shine with the flames of unhappy Elissa. What kindled so great a fire remains hidden; but the harsh pains of a great love betrayed, and what a maddened woman can do, which is well known, lead the hearts of the Teucrians to a sad omen.
In Book VI, in the descent to the world of the dead, which The Golden Bough makes possible, Aeneas finds Dido in the Fields of Mourning and tries to explain himself. She does not answer, and flees into the grove where Sychaeus, her husband of before, answers her cares and matches her love:
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, she kept her eyes fixed on the ground, turned away, and her face is moved no more by the conversation begun than if she were hard stone or a Marpesian crag. At last she tears herself away and flees, hostile, into the shady grove, where Sychaeus, her husband of before, answers her cares and matches her love.
What It Means
The pyre is the point at which the image of fire changes its nature. In Book IV, Dido's love is a hidden fire that consumes her, kindled by two gods, and on the pyre the fire ceases to be a metaphor and becomes matter: it burns his things and her body. The passion that Venus kindled out of fear, and that Juno exploited to hold Aeneas back, ends where no one planned it.
The poem also uses the pyre as a place of accounts. Dido tallies what she did as one closing a life: she founded a city, saw its walls, avenged her husband. Only the last phrase breaks from the list and names what she would undo, the arrival of the ships. She does not ask forgiveness: she asks that Aeneas see the fire. She dies without reconciling with anything and wants to be seen, and Book V confirms that she was.
The pyre also has political meaning. From the same bonfire comes the imprecation in which Dido passes from personal vengeance to that of a people, asking for eternal hatred between Tyrians and Trojans and for an avenger born of her bones. It is the poetic origin of the enmity between Rome and Carthage, and tradition reads the nameless avenger as Hannibal (Punic Wars).
Death, according to the narrator, is outside the rule: she did not die by fate or by a merited death, but before her time, in an impulse, and for that reason the lock had not yet been cut. The one who cuts it is Juno's messenger, the goddess who arranged the cave, and the gesture may be compassion or reparation.
Almost nothing of Dido and Aeneas's love is staged: the only direct dialogue in the book is that of the rupture. The pyre, made of his clothes, weapons, and bed, occupies the place of the scene the poem did not write, the marriage she says she lived, and Aeneas sees it burn from afar without knowing what he is looking at, because the cause of the fire, the narrator says, remains hidden.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Passion, Fate and Free Will, Duty, Empire and Colonialism.
- Characters: Dido, Aeneas, Anna, Juno, Venus.
- Nearby symbols: The Golden Bough, which leads Aeneas to his meeting with Dido's shade, and the Penates, the household gods that Dido also lost.