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THE A EN El D
with strong pathos, culminating in her plea to Aeneas (305-30) not to leave her
when she has given her whole self to her love for him. Aeneas replies that he is
not free to stay, and at this Dido changes from a pathetically deserted woman to
a personification of hatred and vengeance. In a highly rhetorical speech (365—87)
she distances herself from her lover, ceases to be a human individual with whom
communication is possible, and becomes instead a kind of avenging Fury, an
archetypal and terrifying symbol of slighted pride and bitter anger. In her long
curse against her lover (590-629) she revolves thoughts of the horrors she could
have inflicted (600—2) and ends by invoking the long years of history to achieve
her vengeance, calling on every Carthaginian to hate and destroy the Romans
at every possible opportunity. In her last speech of all, just before she kills
herself, she unites both aspects of her tragic character, first re-invoking (651—8)
the pathos which was the dominant feature of the first part of the book, and
finally returning to her passionate hatred for the lover who has scorned her,
upon whom she must have vengeance (661—2).
As so often with a Greek tragedy the reader is astonished and horrified not
merely at the actual events of the disaster, but at the total disintegration of what
had once been a strong, noble and virtuous character. 1 He seeks explanations,
he seeks to apportion blame. There are clearly contributory causes, things that
might have been done otherwise: Aeneas should have perceived that he was
allowing a situation to develop from which he might escape but Dido would
not; Dido should not have broken her vow of chastity to her dead husband
Sychaeus, and she should have fought against a passion which she must have
known could lead her nowhere. But in essence what we have is a tragic and
moving study of a wholly sympathetic character broken and destroyed by the
pressure of circumstances which she could not in fact resist. She might have
done, it was not impossible to try, but they were in the event too strong for her.
To a large extent this is symbolized in the scheming of the goddesses Venus and
Juno — they enmeshed Dido in a net from which she was not in the end able to
break out. She had to measure her own character and her own will against the
force of hostile circumstances. The tragedy of her story is that she allowed
herself to be defeated.
The last word should be on the significance of the tragedy of Dido within the
structure of the poem (far too often it has been treated as if it were detachable).
Above all it introduces a note alien to the serene prophecy of Jupiter in Book 1:
it becomes apparent that the Roman mission is not to be achieved without
tragic events which cast doubts on the whole concept (it has indeed been a
common view that Book 4 'breaks the back of the whole poem'). Nothing
could have been easier than for Virgil to depict Dido as an obstacle to the Roman
destiny whose removal we could all applaud, a sort of Circe, a Calypso, a Siren.
1 See Quinn (1963) 296*., and (1965) i6ff.
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