3—
Dido's Journey Towards Death:
Her Character:
Conclusion
Virgil describes Dido's journey towards death with all the artistry at his command.[33]
The peripeteia occurs immediately after the climax of the narrative which we have
just dealt with; the poet passes rapidly over the period during which the two lovers
live peacefully together, as though he were afraid of showing his hero neglecting his
duty. We only hear what Fama says (173ff.): she distorts the truth when she depicts
the pair as indulging in a life of luxury, unmindful of their duty as rulers; it is only
later that we discover that this is untrue, when Mercury finds Aeneas busy with the
work of building the city. The gossip reaches Iarbas, Jupiter listens to him and
dispatches Mercury, Aeneas immediately obeys his command; Dido hears about his
first secret arrangements for departure again from Fama, who thus completes her
fatal work. From this point onwards, we accompany Dido along the short path she
has yet to tread, which leads her to her death by way of every torment of the soul.[34]
133 Virgil had no need, nor did he consider it his duty, to display originality in the
way in which Dido expresses her feelings. Despite the fact that much ancient
literature has not survived, there is hardly a single essential feature in Virgil's
depiction of her emotions that we cannot find in his predecessors. Here, too, the poet
was borrowing his material; his personal contribution was the art by which he
transformed it, and this art was so great that Dido is the only figure created by a
Roman poet who was destined to have a place in world literature.
The material that was available to Virgil was rich enough. The grief of a forsaken
woman had again and again been the subject of Greek poetry of every genre and
style. From this mass of material, Virgil from the very first rejected anything which
was inconsistent with the dignity of his style as being either too realistic or not
realistic enough. Tragedy supplied the earliest example of the figure of the forsaken
woman in Medea. During the Hellenistic period there were many such characters of
the more dignified love-poetry, more at any rate than we know of today; but we can
name Ariadne, whose lament at the loss of her love had been made familiar to the
Roman public by Catullus;[35] Phyllis, well-known through Callimachus' poem; Oe-
none, whose unhappy fate is certainly known to us at any rate from a Hellenistic
version (that of Quintus of Smyrna), to say nothing of numerous other comparable
poems whose artistic merits have been totally obliterated because of the inadequate
information that we have about them. Of these, two, like Dido, committed suicide:
Phyllis hangs herself all alone (Ovid Rem . Am . 591), Oenone throws herself in the
flames of the funeral-pyre which is consuming the body of Paris. But Greek poetry
had also often enough recounted the story of unfortunate characters who commit
suicide for reasons other than disappointment in love, and Virgil drew upon at least
one of these figures, perhaps the most famous of all, the Ajax of Sophocles.
Virgil has made as much use as possible of the abundance of available motifs,
intent as ever on the enrichment of his portrayal. But he does not describe a gloomy,
134 irregular oscillation of the emotions: his Dido is not tossed this way and that by the
conflict of her passions. On the contrary, the tragedy strides to its conclusion in a
clear and controlled fashion. Here too, Virgil strives as far as possible for dramatic
effect. He narrates only the observable action; he does not describe emotions but
almost always lets the heroine herself express them. Indeed, he always directs his
attention above all to linking the progressive heightening of these emotions closely
with the development of the observable action. Each new phase in the outward
course of events leads to a new phase in her inner development; and each of these
phases represents as purely as possible one particular state of mind, uncontaminated
by any other. Her first words to Aeneas (305ff.) express painful surprise at his lack
of loyalty;[36] she has not yet entirely given up all hope of awakening his pity and
sense of obligation towards her. When she realizes from his words that everything is
now over, she says farewell in words of scornful hatred .[37] She cannot maintain this
135 iron façade for long. When Aeneas' preparations for departure begin to be made
openly, she abandons her pride – and the poet makes us realize what this means to
someone like Dido – she gives way to humble renunciation and begs for at least a
short delay so that she will not collapse in the pain of parting (429ff.).[38] This
136 extreme measure does not work: Aeneas remains unmoved; horrifyinlg omens of all
kinds appear and Dido decides on death. The preparations for it begin; Dido herself
takes part in them; we hear the thoughts that torture her on a sleepless night as her
hard-won repose is lost in the storm of her emotions, and these thoughts lead her to
the conclusion that death is really the only way out of her sorrow: she has finally
come to despair about her future.[39] And now, in the grey light of dawn, she sees her
fate sealed: the fleet is sailing away. The sudden sight rouses her to extreme anger ,
137 which is accompanied by a thirst for revenge :[40] what her vengeful hand cannot
achieve, the curse shall do. But Dido cannot end her life like this, in demented fury.
She makes her last arrangements, ensures that her sister will be the first to find her
body,[41] and mounts the pyre. Gazing at the silent witnesses of her shortlived happi-
ness she discovers the sublime peace of renunciation and takes stock of her life:[42] in
138 full consciousness of her own greatness and of the height from which she has fallen,
she takes her leave, unreconciled with her murderer, but reconciled with death.
All this is presented to us as vividly as possible in Dido's own words; only the
linking text is supplied by the poet. From the point of view of technique, it is worth
noting how Virgil has sought (deliberately, it seems) to avoid, or disguise, the
monotony of constant monologues. She confesses her love to her sister. The peripe -
teia is followed by her two speeches to Aeneas, then she entrusts the mission to her
sister. The considerations which lead to her final decision (534ff.) are presented not
in a monologue but as an account of her thoughts ( secum ita corde volutat [she
communed with herself in her heart]). The sight of the ships sailing away throws her
into a demented fury, in which she breaks out into wild cries. She comes to herself,
horrified to find that she is talking to herself: quid loquor? aut ubi sum? quae
mentem insania mutat? (595) ['What am I saying? Where am I? What mad folly is
distorting my mind?']. The monologue develops into the prayer and mandata
[orders], which are naturally spoken aloud. Her final monologue also begins with an
apostrophe, as in tragedy.[43]
Virgil will hardly have found individually characterized female characters in his
Hellenistic sources; nor can his heroine be compared in this respect with her great
tragic predecessors, Deianeira, Medea or Ajax. She is not depicted with any realistic
touches that might lead us to think that she was modelled on some living person, nor
does she have any peculiar trait of character. On the other hand she is certainly not
like some inert musical instrument from which, although it has no feeling, the poet
can coax sounds full of pathos. The listener is expected not only to be interested in
the state of her emotions, but also to feel personal sympathy for her, as the poet
himself unmistakably did. In short, Dido is an ideal portrait of a heroic woman as
conceived by Virgil. She therefore has to be portrayed in a way that is essentially
negative: she must not be represented as girlishly naïve or timorous;[44] or humble
(like so many of Ovid's portrayals of women), or sly, spiteful or barbarically savage
139 (the idea of physically attacking Aeneas to punish him for his faithlessness only
occurs to her when she is in a demented state of delirium);[45] moaning and lamenta-
tion, sentimental wallowing in her own misfortune, useless regrets that things have
happened like this and not turned out differently – Virgil uses all these standard
features of tragic monodies and melodramatic Hellenistic scenes extremely spar-
ingly;[46] only at one point, as we have seen, does Dido forget her pride. In contrast to
these negative characteristics, Dido is given what seemed to Virgil a truly regal
attitude: the deepest humanitas [sense of humanity] combined with magnanimitas
[greatness of soul], displayed magnificently in her last words. Otherwise he dis-
penses altogether with devices that might have appealed to a poet striving to
characterize his heroine – for instance, he could have transformed the masculine
firmness of purpose and energy which she had displayed after Sychaeus' death into
a dominating trait which she still possessed even in her misfortune; or he could have
developed her humanitas in accordance with contemporary[47] ethical ideas into a
generous forgiveness which would put her enemy to shame; or yet again, he could
have brought her consciousness of her royal duty, to which Anna appeals, into the
centre of her existence, so that everything else would seem unimportant by compari-
son: as it stands, we find, somewhat to our surprise, that the dying queen has no
concern at all for the future of her city.
Virgil's renunciation of detailed characterization is consistent with the way that
he does not attribute Dido's voluntary death to one single motive, but heaps up
every imaginable one; sorrow at the loss of her beloved is by no means the motive
that predominates. Here Virgil, whether consciously or unconsciously, is under the
spell of tradition. For, strangely enough, although poets, particularly of the Hellenis-
tic period, frequently described the suicide of young people who are unhappy in
love,[48] and although on the other hand Greek epic and Greek poetry in general
140 frequently described the faithful wife who voluntarily followed her husband to
death,[49] there are very few examples of girls or women inflicting an injury on
themselves purely because they are disappointed in love, or their love is unrecipro-
cated.[50] Rather, in the majority of cases, the hero or heroine suffers from a sense of
shame because of some wrongful or humiliating deed: the threat of dishonour, or
horror at their own action makes life unendurable.[51] We have seen that Virgil also
introduced a motive of this kind: non servata fides cineri promissa Sychaei (522)
[the vow which I made to the ashes of Sychaeus is broken] is the thought which sets
the seal on Dido's decision. But that is not all: there is also shame at the insult she
has suffered (500ff.), the loss of her reputation for chastity, her greatest claim to
fame (322); fear of being abandoned to the enemies who surround her, now that she
has even lost the trust of her own subjects (320ff., 534ff.); the horrifying omens of
every kind, which increase her fear (452ff.) the voice of her dead husband (457ff.).
All these rage within her, and she succumbs to their combined onslaught, not to one
single sorrow. Was Virgil seduced here too by the sheer richness of the motives
available to him? Or did he think that it was impossible to accumulate too many
causes to account for the death of his heroine, to outweigh such a heroic life? Here,
too, he has taken care to preserve unity within this multiplicity: the whole of this
disaster arises from one deed, and it is one man who has turned this deed from a
blessing to ruin. We can only admire the skill with which we are made to see the
far-reaching consequences of Aeneas' act, one after the other, without being wearied
by any longwinded narrative. And this very skill, which allows a situation which has
been brought about by a single deed to unfold in every direction like some growing
141 plant – this skill irresistibly but imperceptibly convinces the listener of the necessity
of the tragic ending, whereas other great poets achieve this effect by letting it
emerge from the growth of a deeprooted and individually depicted character .
It still remains for us to look at the way in which Dido prepares and accomplishes
her death. There was a traditional version of the final scene, which Virgil must have
had in his mind's eye:[52] Dido has had a funeral pyre constructed for her on the
pretext that she intended to dissolve her former ties by means of a sacrifice to the
dead; and on this pyre she kills herself by the sword.[53] Virgil needed only to
substitute another pretext that was connected with Aeneas in order to make it
convincing. He replaced the sacrifice to the dead with a magic one, that was still
142 suited to the Underworld, so that it could serve as a preparation for her own descent
into that realm.[54] But, to the Roman mind, there was something mean and vulgar
about magic; they knew of the old witches and wizards who carried on their disrepu-
table trade with love-charms.[55] Virgil must therefore have felt it necessary to
transform the whole scene into something great and heroic. The maga [witch] is no
common witch, but one who has 'guarded the temple of the Hesperides,' and knew
how to tame the dragon (483-5);[56] this helps to convince us that she also possesses
143 the other powers of which she boasts: love-magic comes first, but this is followed by
magical powers which go beyond those that are normally mentioned and begin to
suggest an almost divine omnipotence. The magic ceremony is then performed in a
style that is correspondingly elevated: for this occasion no ordinary altar will suf-
fice, but a funeral-pyre, surrounded by altars, is constructed; Erebus and Chaos are
invoked, as well as Hecate, the goddess of magic; 'in a voice like thunder' she calls
up three hundred gods from the depths. And the sacrifice is so sacred that Dido
herself is not too proud to participate as the servant of the gods.[57] For the rest, the
magic rite brings about exactly what Dido intends: a death amidst all the mementos
of the brief period of joy that her love had brought her.
In tragedy we do not normally witness a death on the stage, but are only affected,
like the hero's nearest and dearest, by the impact of the terrible event. So too in
Virgil.[58] We do not see Dido plunge the sword into her breast.[59] Virgil's narrative
144 passes over the decisive moment: her handmaidens see her collapse under the mortal
blow. Lamentation resounds throughout the halls, and spreads like a raging fire
through the streets and houses of the city: we are made to feel the full significance of
the death of a woman like Dido, and it is made explicit in Anna's words: exstinxti te
meque , soror , populumque patresque Sidonios urbemque tuam ['Sister, you have
destroyed my life with your own, and the lives of our people and Sidon's nobility,
and your whole city too'].[60]