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Aeneid, Book 4 — The Tragedy of Dido

Reading Troy · chapter 42 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 4

Aeneid, Book 4 — The Tragedy of Dido

Reading Troy — chapter 42 of 74 · Aeneid, Book 4

Red-figure vase: The Tragedy of Dido
Red-figure vase: The Tragedy of Dido

Aeneid, Book 4 — The Tragedy of Dido (Days, then weeks, after the banquet of Book 1; Carthage; the coast and the queen's palace; the great pyre at the book's close)

Dawn after the banquet. Dido cannot rest. The narrative opens on a queen in the helpless first day of the love Venus has planted in her — sleepless, distracted, returning Aeneas to the temple to repeat the conversation she has already memorised. She speaks to her sister Anna of her sworn fidelity to her dead first husband Sychaeus (whom her brother Pygmalion murdered at the altar in Tyre, sending her into Carthaginian exile) and of how this Trojan stranger has shaken that fidelity. Anna counsels her to consider the practical benefit of a Trojan alliance: she is queen of a young city; she needs a king; she is alone. The pragmatic counsel persuades. Sacrifices are made. The omens are good. Virgil gives the queen one of his most famous similes — Dido through the streets is like a hind shot from cover, the arrow still in her flank, fleeing further into the woods of Crete.

Juno and Venus meet on Olympus and conclude their pact. Juno proposes to marry Dido to Aeneas to keep him out of Italy; Venus consents while knowing the marriage will fail. The next day's hunt is arranged. They ride out in royal procession; a storm comes up; Aeneas and Dido shelter in a cave; the marriage that the gods are calling a marriage and the queen will call a marriage is consummated in a cave with the wind howling and lightning. Virgil's account is one of the cycle's most ambivalent set-pieces: it is not clear whose blame this is, whether it is a marriage at all, what either party has consented to. Fama, the personified Rumour — Virgil's most virtuosic single allegorical figure, a goddess with as many tongues as feathers, as many eyes as wings — spreads the story across the Mediterranean.

The complaint reaches Jupiter through King Iarbas, the African king Dido has refused. Jupiter sends Mercury down to Aeneas with a sharp message: Italy is waiting; you forget your son's future; you forget Rome. Aeneas is shaken. He gives the order to prepare the fleet in secret. Dido learns. She confronts him with the cycle's most morally serious indictment-speech: "Was it for this I welcomed you? Was it for this I gave you my city, my body, my queenship?" She names what she has done for him; she names what he is doing to her. She begs at first; then she rages; then she falls silent and turns from him. Aeneas's answer is the cycle's most-debated single speech: he loved her, but the gods command, and what he wants is not what matters; he must go. He goes.

The third book of the love is its breaking. Dido watches the fleet preparing from a tower; she sends Anna with a last appeal; Aeneas does not yield; her resolve gives way. She orders a great pyre built in the palace courtyard, claiming it is a ritual against Aeneas's effect on her — burn his arms, his sword, his garments, the bed they shared. The household believes her. The pyre is built. Aeneas's fleet sails before dawn. Dido sees the empty bay at first light. She climbs to the pyre. She takes Aeneas's sword from the heap. She speaks her last speech — a recital of what she has built (Carthage, her city, her revenge on her brother), a curse on Aeneas's descendants (her shade will follow him, a Carthaginian avenger will rise from her bones — Hannibal, the cycle's forward shadow to the Punic Wars), and a farewell to her own death. She falls on the sword. Anna runs to her and finds her dying in the pyre's smoke. The flame catches.

Juno, watching, takes pity. She sends Iris down to release Dido's soul from her body — the queen's death has been irregular (suicide, not natural, not by Proserpine's hand), and she needs the divine licence to leave. Iris cuts a lock of Dido's hair as the formal release. Dido dies. The book closes with the smoke of her pyre rising over Carthage and the small fleet of Aeneas under sail to the north, seeing the smoke and not knowing what it is from. The cycle's most famous love-tragedy is over. The Trojan refugee carries her death with him; she carries her city's future destruction by his descendants with hers.

Pen-and-ink: The Tragedy of Dido
Pen-and-ink: The Tragedy of Dido

Analysis

The book the Aeneid is most-loved for

Aeneid 4 is, by long consensus, the Aeneid's most-read single book. Its emotional weight is total: the cycle's most fully developed female character, the most morally serious love-affair in ancient epic, the most-quoted suicide-speech in classical literature, the most-debated ethical question (Aeneas's choice between duty and love), and one of Virgil's most virtuosic allegorical figures (the personification of Rumour). The book has been translated, dramatised, set to music, painted, and re-imagined more than any other section of the Aeneid. Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage (c. 1587), Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689), Berlioz's Les Troyens (1858), and every neoclassical theatre and every twentieth-century novel that quotes Carthage are all this book's children.

Dido as a tragic protagonist

Virgil constructs Dido as the cycle's first non-Greek, non-Trojan tragic protagonist on the Greek-tragic model. The pattern is precise: she is competent, just, beloved by her people, successful in her foundation; her fall is the result of a god's deliberate intervention (Venus and Cupid in Book 1) and her own free choices (the consent at the cave, the persistence after Aeneas's announcement). The two causalities are placed in deliberate moral tension. Is Dido destroyed by Venus, or by herself? Virgil refuses the easy answer. Aristotle's Poetics would have recognised her as a tragic hero — a woman of high station whose fall comes from a hamartia (an excess, not a vice) and produces pity and fear. Virgil seems to be writing the book as a deliberate fusion of Roman epic form and Greek tragic structure.

The cave-scene's ambivalence

The consummation in the cave during the storm is the cycle's most morally ambiguous single passage. Virgil's language is precise and careful: the gods (Juno and Venus) call it a marriage; the queen calls it a marriage; Aeneas does not — and on this distinction Aeneas's defence in his great farewell-speech rests. Was there consent? Was there a contract? The text refuses to settle this. Virgil's choice is the cycle's most acute piece of moral writing: he gives the reader the same uncertainty the characters live in. Anna's pragmatic counsel before the hunt, the storm's interruption, the cave's privacy, the gods' presiding voice — none of these elements alone determines the moral question. Dido's later actions are based on the assumption that a marriage occurred; Aeneas's later actions are based on the assumption that it did not. The Aeneid's tragedy is partly that two reasonable interpretations of the same moment lead to incommensurable conclusions.

Aeneas's farewell speech

Aeneas's speech to Dido refusing to stay is the cycle's most-debated single piece of moral writing. It is short — about thirty lines in Latin, sixty in Dryden — and almost cold. He says: I love you (the word is "amavi," past tense, "I loved"); I would have stayed in Troy if I could; I must go to Italy because the gods command it; Jupiter has been clear; my son's future and his sons' future require this. The speech has been read as the Aeneid's clearest statement of Roman pietas (duty over personal desire), as the cycle's most damning indictment of Roman pietas (a man can betray a woman because the gods told him to), and as everything in between. Virgil does not adjudicate. He gives Dido the better rhetoric and Aeneas the unanswerable theology, and the cycle's reader has been arguing about which weighs more ever since.

Fama

The allegorical figure of Fama (Aeneid 4.173-197) is the cycle's most-imitated single allegorical construction. She is the personification of rumour; she walks the earth at night with her head in the clouds; she has as many tongues as she has feathers, as many eyes as wings, as many ears as both; she carries truth and falsehood indifferently; she grows by what she carries. Dryden's English renders her as a tour de force of Augustan formality: "Fame, the great ill, from small beginnings grows; / Swift from the first; and ev'ry moment brings / New vigour to her flights, new pinions to her wings." The figure passes into Spenser's Faerie Queene, into Milton's Sin and Death, into every English allegory of vice through the eighteenth century, and into Pope's Temple of Fame. Virgil's invention is one of Western literature's most productive single allegorical figures.

The curse: Hannibal

Dido's curse on Aeneas's descendants is the Aeneid's longest forward shadow. She curses Aeneas with the failure of his settlement, the loss of his son, the early death of his line; she curses Carthage and Rome to be eternal enemies; she calls for an avenger to rise from her bones. The "ultor ex ossibus" — "avenger from my bones" — is Hannibal, the Carthaginian general whose victory at Cannae in 216 BCE was the worst defeat Rome ever suffered and whose campaign nearly ended the Roman state. Virgil's audience knew this back-story by heart. The Punic Wars (264-146 BCE) were the Roman state's existential trial; Hannibal's invasion of Italy in 218 BCE was the cycle's longest-acting historical consequence of any of Dido's choices. The curse is therefore the cycle's most-fulfilled prophecy — historically, structurally, and emotionally. Dido is destroying Aeneas's descendants in advance.

The death-scene and Juno's mercy

The suicide is staged with precise care. Dido is on the pyre; she has Aeneas's sword (the gift she had given him); she speaks the cycle's most-quoted suicide-speech and then falls forward on the blade. The detail Virgil adds — Juno sends Iris down to cut a lock of Dido's hair so the soul can leave — is theologically precise. Dido has died irregularly: not by natural cause, not by Proserpine's claim, not on her appointed day; her soul cannot leave the body without a divine release. Juno, who has been her patron-goddess and who arranged the marriage, takes responsibility for the release. The scene is one of the cycle's most morally serious acts of divine kindness, and it does not absolve Juno of her role in causing Dido's situation.

Dryden's Dido

Dryden's Book 4 is one of the great achievements of English Augustan translation. The famous speeches — Dido's reproach of Aeneas, his farewell, Fama's allegory, Dido's last speech and curse — all receive the formal weight of Dryden's heroic couplets. The translator is on his most Augustan ground here: Virgil's high formality matches Dryden's, and the heroic couplet's tendency to seal each thought in a self-contained rhyming pair suits Dido's rhetoric well. The famous reproach — "Was this the love you promised? Was this the faith? / Did I deserve this from a guest?" — gets the formal weight Virgil's hexameters give it. Modern translations (Mandelbaum's blank verse, Fitzgerald's looser blank verse) are more conversational; Dryden's heroic couplet is more declamatory; the modern reader can choose, but for the formal grandeur of Dido's reproach Dryden's English remains canonical.

What to watch for

  • Book 5 will take Aeneas to Sicily for the funeral games of his father Anchises; the structural answer to the burning grief of Book 4 is the public ceremony of Book 5.
  • Book 6 will descend to the underworld; Aeneas will meet Dido's shade there in the cycle's most chilling silence — she will turn from him without a word.
  • Aeneas's sword (the gift) is the same sword Dido falls on; the gift becomes the suicide-instrument, a structural parallel to Ajax falling on Hector's sword in Posthomerica 5.
  • The Hannibal-curse will be paid in full in 218-202 BCE; Virgil's audience knew the price.

Echoes across the cycle

Backward echoes

Dido is constructed against the cycle's earlier female figures. She is the cycle's first non-Greek non-Trojan tragic heroine, but Virgil builds her with materials from the cycle's existing female roster. Her queenly authority in Book 1 echoes Hecuba in the Iliad's domestic scenes; her fall in love is structurally an inverted Helen (the woman whose love starts a war becomes, in Dido, the woman whose love ends in suicide); her devoted fidelity to her dead first husband Sychaeus answers Andromache's continuing devotion to dead Hector in Aeneid 3; her suicide on the pyre with the lover's sword is the cycle's most direct structural rhyme with Ajax's suicide on Hector's sword in Posthomerica 5 (the gift becomes the suicide-instrument). Aeneas's farewell-speech reaches back across the cycle to Achilles's farewell to Briseis in Iliad 1 and to Odysseus's farewell to Calypso in Odyssey 5: in all three a man chooses a different course than the woman who loves him, and in all three the rhetoric of the choice is the cycle's most-debated material. Fama as personified rumour reaches back to the Iliad's Ossa (Iliad 2.93, Rumour as messenger of Zeus moving through the army) and forward to every subsequent allegorical figure of vice in European literature. Dido's curse on Aeneas's descendants reaches forward in the cycle's historical present — the Punic Wars of 264-146 BCE were the Roman state's existential trial, and Virgil's audience knew Hannibal as the historical fulfilment of Dido's "avenger from my bones."

Forward echoes

Book 5 is the immediate sequel: Aeneas's fleet, sailing north from Carthage, is forced back to Sicily by adverse winds; the funeral games for Anchises follow, the structural answer to Book 4's burning grief by public ceremony. Book 6 will give us the cycle's most charged silence — Aeneas descends to the underworld and meets Dido's shade in the Fields of Mourning; he begs her forgiveness; she turns from him without a word and walks off into the dark to her dead first husband Sychaeus. The silence is the cycle's most-quoted single non-speech and the Aeneid's deepest moral verdict on Aeneas's choice. Book 12 will give us the unresolved final image: Aeneas, in the cycle's last act, will be a man who has refused mercy to Turnus the way the gods refused mercy to Dido; the structural rhyme between Book 4 and Book 12 is one of the Aeneid's quietest and most damning architectural moves. Historically, the Hannibal-curse will be paid in full in 218-202 BCE: Hannibal will cross the Alps with elephants, defeat Rome at Cannae, occupy southern Italy for sixteen years, and only be turned back by Scipio Africanus's invasion of Africa; Carthage will be destroyed in 146 BCE by Scipio Aemilianus, who is said to have wept at the burning city quoting Iliad 6 ("a day shall come when Priam's holy Troy / and Priam and the people of Priam shall be destroyed"). The cycle's historical fulfilment of its own prophecy is one of the most disquieting facts about reading the Aeneid: Virgil's audience knew the curse worked. Dido as character will be the cycle's most-rewritten woman in Western literature — Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, Marlowe's Dido, Purcell's opera, Berlioz's Troyens, every subsequent setting of "When I am laid in earth" reaches back through layers of love-tragedy to this book.

Cast in this chapter

On stage

  • Dido — queen of Carthage; consummates the love in the cave; reproaches Aeneas at his departure; falls on his sword on the great pyre
  • Aeneas — consummates with Dido in the cave; receives Mercury's message; gives the farewell-speech; sails before dawn
  • Anna — Dido's sister; counsels the marriage; runs to the dying queen at the pyre
  • Aphrodite — Venus; pacts with Juno; consents to the marriage knowing it will fail
  • Hera — Juno; proposes the marriage; sends Iris to release Dido's soul at the end
  • Zeus — Jupiter; sends Mercury with the sharp reminder of Italy
  • Hermes — Mercury; descends with Jupiter's message
  • Iris — sent by Juno to cut the lock that releases Dido's soul
  • Ascanius — small; on the Trojan ships during the cave-storm and the departure

Mentioned / off-stage

  • Creusa — Aeneas's lost first wife; her phantom's prophecy from Aeneid 2 hangs over this book
  • Anchises — Aeneas's lost father; his posthumous wishes (sought-Italy) drive Aeneas's choice to leave
  • Achilles — long dead; named in Aeneas's farewell-speech as a measure of Trojan losses
  • Hector — long dead; named in Dido's reproach as one of the war's wounds

This post is part of Reading Troy, a slow daily readalong through the four canonical Trojan-cycle epics — Homer's Iliad, Quintus Smyrnaeus's Posthomerica, Virgil's Aeneid, and Homer's Odyssey — read in chronological narrative order.