Painting by Nathaniel Dance-Holland.
1/ After fleeing Troy, Aeneas and his people wander for some time and stop in Carthage. In Books 2-3, he tells his story to Queen Dido of the Phoenicians.
“The queen, for her part, all that evening ached
With longing that her heart’s blood fed, a wound
Or inward fire eating her away.
The manhood of the man, his pride of birth,
Came home to her time and again; his looks,
His words remained with her to haunt her mind,
And desire for him gave her no rest.”
(Book 4)
(translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
What does that remind me of?
“She loved me for the dangers I had passed,
And I loved her that she did pity them.”
(Othello, Act 1 scene 3)
Dido confides in Anna:
“‘[…] I shall say it: since that time
Sychaeus, my poor husband, met his fate,
And blood my brother shed stained our hearth gods,
This man alone has wrought upon me so
And moved my soul to yield. I recognize
The signs of the old flame, of old desire.
But O chaste life, before I break your laws,
I pray that Earth may open it, gape for me
Down to its depth, or the omnipotent
With one stroke blast me to the shades, pale shades
Of Erebus and the deep world of night!
That man who took me to himself in youth
Has taken all my love, may that man keep it,
Hold it forever with him in the tomb.’”
(ibid.)
Poor Dido. Why do we fall in love? To love is to make ourselves vulnerable to grief and heartache. She yields, she hopes, she opens up herself to Aeneas, only to have her heart broken as Aeneas follows his fate and leaves her for Italy.
In this chapter, Aeneas still feels like a blank—one wishes Virgil depicted more of Aeneas’s struggle between his feelings for Dido and his sense of duty, as he sets out for Italy to found a new kingdom for the Trojans so that “Priam’s great hall should stand again”—but Virgil focuses on Dido and his depiction of her passion and heartbreak is deeply moving.
“… At that sight, what were your emotions, Dido?
[…] Unconscionable Love,
To what extremes will you not drive our hearts!
She now felt driven to weep again, again
To move him, if she could, by supplication,
Humbling her pride before her love—to leave
Nothing untried, not to die needlessly.”
(ibid.)
One can’t help thinking though that Venus is cruel—she knows the fate for Aeneas, she knows his mission—why does she make Dido fall in love with him? (Don’t say the Greek/ Roman gods represent impulses, or forces beyond our control—I know, but in the world of these poems, they are characters).
2/ Whereas Homer often mentions time (the Trojan War lasts 10 years; Odysseus takes 10 years to go home, of which one year is with Kirke/ Circe and seven years is with Kalypso), Virgil does not. He might even be a bit blurry on time and geography (but then the Aeneid wasn’t quite finished when he died).
Apparently people disagree about how long Aeneas stays in Carthage. In the first five chapters (confusingly called books), there are four references to time. In Book 5, after leaving Carthage and landing again in Sicily, Aeneas organises some competitions to mark the one-year anniversary of his father’s death, meaning that there’s a gap of one year between Anchises’s death in Sicily and the second time Aeneas passes through Sicily on the way to Italy. In Book 1, Dido asks Aeneas to tell his story, saying “now the seventh summer brings you here”, which marks the beginning of their love affair; but in Book 5, during the funeral games, Iris appears in disguise and says to the Trojans “We’ve seen/ The seventh summer since the fall of Troy.”
Does this mean that Aeneas only passes a couple of months in Carthage—let’s ignore the distance between it and Sicily—or does it mean that Virgil makes a mistake, Aeneas is meant to arrive in Carthage in the sixth summer of his wanderings, and he stays there for almost a year?
Personally I’d like to think that there’s no mistake and Aeneas stays in Carthage for only a month or two: there’s no indication that Aeneas leaves Sicily immediately after his father’s death, and his time with Dido sounds like summer. But this passage adds to the confusion:
“Now in no time at all
Through all the African cities Rumor goes—
Nimble as quicksilver among evils. […]
In those days Rumor took an evil joy
At filling countrysides with whispers, whispers,
Gossip of what was done, and never done:
How this Aeneas landed, Trojan born,
How Dido in her beauty graced his company,
Then how they reveled all the winter long
Unmindful of the realm, prisoners of lust.”
(Book 4)
Unless we dismiss Rumour altogether, this sounds like Aeneas stays in Carthage for about a year.
3/ In Book 6, Aeneas goes to the Underworld, which is obviously modelled after Book 11 of the Odyssey. Compared to Homer however, Virgil describes in greater detail the path to, and the look of, the Underworld.
“The path goes on from that place to the waves
Of Tartarus’s Acheron. Thick with mud,
A whirlpool out of a vast abyss
Boils up and belches all the silt it carries
Into Cocytus. Here the ferryman,
A figure of fright, keeper of waters and streams,
Is Charon, foul and terrible, his beard
Grown wild and hoar, his staring eyes all flame,
His sordid cloak hung from a shoulder knot…”
(Book 6)
It is a horrifying place.
“Now voices crying loud were heard at once—
The souls of infants wailing. At the door
Of the sweet life they were to have no part in,
Torn from the breast, a black day took them off
And drowned them all in bitter death…”
(ibid.)
It is more visual, and detailed.
In both poems, the protagonists travel to the Underworld and meet the dead people they know. In the Odyssey, there are four great moments: Odysseus meets Agamemnon, who tells the story of his murder (which becomes the basis for the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides); he meets Akhilleus (Achilles), who dies with glory but now says he would rather live an ordinary life than “lord it over all the exhausted dead”; he meets Aias (Ajax), who hated him in life and continues to hate him in death, refusing his gesture of conciliation; and he also meets his mother, who he hasn’t realised is dead, and tries to hug her in vain. The last three moments are extremely moving. Homer gets us to think about the people who have been in our lives: those we love and those we hate, those we may have been like and those we hope not to be like.
The Underworld scene in the Aeneid has one great moment, but it is deeply moving as we have been with them from the beginning: Aeneas meets the spirit of Dido, not having realised that she’s dead, and she doesn’t speak to him.
No wonder some people think Book 6 is the most moving one in the Aeneid.
