Dido In The Aeneid

Two Dido but One Fate In both Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Heroines, a very sad story of the queen of Carthage is conveyed to readers. However, the construction of the heroic character of Dido, the queen of Carthage and her tragic story, differs in these two texts, although they were written in the same time sphere, under the realm of Emperor Augustus. In this paper, I will try to show this difference by focusing on the contrast perspectives of these famous writers about woman’s rationality. While reading the story of Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid, one is struck with the constant use of the words “fire” and “burning” which are generally used to depict a reciprocal love. However, in the Aeneid, these words do not convey a mutuality. In

The more Dido goes mad with love and becomes “irrational”, the more Aeneas holds on his duty. For instance, after Jove sends his messenger, Aeneas “yearns to be gone, to desert this land he loves, thunderstruck by the warnings.” (4:42), and when Dido asks why, he says “There (Italy) lies my love, there lies my homeland now.”(4:43). In contrast to Aeneas, however, Dido gives up on her kingdom as soon as she falls in love with Aeneas and all works such as building towers and walls, are suspended. In addition, after she dies, Anna says, “You have destroyed your life, my sister; mine too, your people, the lords of Sidon and your new city here.” (4:48). In a way, through Anna’s words, Virgil blames her because of her thoughtless action. In other words, he enhances Aeneas’ manliness and authority by comparing him to Dido, who acts irrationally due to her crazy kind of love although she stands for another authoritative figure in the text.

On the other hand, in the Heroines, Ovid narrates a different kind of Dido. With the use of first person perspective, he gives us a chance to dive into Dido’s inner thoughts and this, I think, is a way to show her rationality in contrast to Virgil who focuses upon just actions and interprets them as some irrational reactions. For example, in the Aeneid, Dido is represented as hateful even towards the little child of Aeneas as well as his nation. She says:

However, in the Heroines, Dido contradicts this hatred by stating, “I do not hate Aeneas- I deplore your faithfulness but only love more.” (Ovid 7:108). You may ask, like Virgil, if she is so rational as men, why does she commit suicide? This is the trick of Ovid, which I like very much. He takes the same action, the suicide, and bases it on another reason. In the Heroines, through a suicide note kind of writing, we learn that Ovid’s Dido chooses to commit suicide in contrast to Virgil’s Dido, who is driven to do that. In the Aeneid, Aeneas leads Dido to death while in the Heroines it happens as Dido says “When my epitaph is thus described: “Aeneas furnished her motive and the means, but Dido died by her own hand.” (7:115).Thus, we can say that her reason for committing suicide is just to show her own agency. It sounds like a noble suicide now. Also, in the very beginning, Ovid describes her as a rational person who understands his/her fatal flaw and is ready for the result. That’s why, he constructs the whole text juts as “the waste of a few words” (7:108) because there is nothing to say