I only threw this party 4 u: Dido's unrequited love

Book 4 of the Aeneid is one of my all-time favorite selections of Latin poetry. For those who don’t know what the Aeneid is, it’s essentially a fanfiction/sequel written by the Latin poet Vergil to Homer’s Iliad, commissioned by Caesar Augutus, the first emperor of Rome. The Aeneid follows the story of Aeneas, a displaced Trojan prince and a son of the goddess Venus (and, for the most part, a self-insert of Augustus himself). He receives a prophecy from the Fates that he is destined to find and establish the Roman Republic in the country now known as Italy. While he and his crew are drifting at sea, however, Juno swears revenge on the Trojans and attacks their ships, until Aeneas and his crew ultimately manage to flee to Carthage, a small but powerful city on the African coastline, ruled by Queen Dido. Dido and Aeneas quickly engage in a furtive love affair. However, their peace only lasts until Aeneas is contacted again by the gods, who tell him to set out for Rome again. He abandons Dido, who then commits suicide out of heartbreak. 

Book 4 has always left me with questions unanswered. Why does Aeneas abandon Dido when he could’ve stayed in Carthage and constructed an overpowering, jointly-ruled empire with her? Is it truly because of his so-called fate, or is there something else? Why does Dido respond to his abandonment with suicide? Does Dido genuinely love Aeneas at all? In fact, the truth may be more convoluted.

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Dido with Aeneas

In book 1 of the Aeneid, the reader first meets Dido, recently widowed, as she welcomes Aeneas and the displaced Trojans into her banquet hall. Meanwhile, Venus conspires in the heavens. She seeks to aid the Trojans in their journey to claim Aeneas’s birthright to Italy, but now they’ve landed and settled in a foreign land across the sea, having seemingly lost the motivation to continue their pursuit of Italy. What can she do about mortal politics as the mere goddess of erotic love? Stirring up a furtive love affair between Aeneas and Dido, of course! However, to do so, she must first supersede Dido’s faithfulness to her late husband Sychaeus—a “fidelity (pudor) so strong that Dido counts its loss as undermining her primary claim to fame” —with erotic passion. Gutting emphasizes that Vergil relegates her erotic love for Sychaeus to the past. Dido exclusively refers to it “in terms of its vestigia (4.23),” personifying the erotic bond as something absent and left only in “traces.” Despite losing Sychaeus’s physical body and their erotic bond, by extension, she nonetheless retains her conjugal virtue of being univira, a faithful wife, in her consciousness. To upset her conjugal bond with Sychaeus, Venus attempts to break past Dido’s resistance against unfaithful passion with a physical displacement of the conjugal world with the erotic—in replacing Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, with Cupid, the very embodiment of erotic love, Venus initiates the process of transference in Dido’s subconscious, ultimately developing into an erotic passion for Ascanius. The following is an excerpt from Aen. 1.695-722, where Dido meets Cupid/Ascanius:

"Paret Amor dictis carae genetricis, et alas

exuit, et gressu gaudens incedit Iuli.

At Venus Ascanio placidam per membra quietem

inrigat, et fotum gremio dea tollit in altos

Idaliae lucos, ubi mollis amaracus illum

floribus et dulci adspirans complectitur umbra. 

…

Mirantur dona Aeneae, mirantur Iulum

flagrantisque dei voltus simulataque verba,

[pallamque et pictum croceo velamen acantho.]

Praecipue infelix, pesti devota futurae,

expleri mentem nequit ardescitque tuendo

Phoenissa, et pariter puero donisque movetur.

Ille ubi complexu Aeneae colloque pependit

et magnum falsi implevit genitoris amorem,

reginam petit haec oculis, haec pectore toto

haeret et interdum gremio fovet, inscia Dido,

insidat quantus miserae deus; at memor ille

matris Acidaliae paulatim abolere Sychaeum

incipit, et vivo temptat praevertere amore

iam pridem resides animos desuetaque corda."

With these words Cupid prepares the gifts for the mother,

and took off his wings, and, rejoicing, trips along with the step of Iulus.

But Venus pours gentle sleep through the limbs to Ascanius,

and the goddess carries him, warming him in her bosom, to the high groves 

of Idalia, where soft marjoram and the breath of its sweet shade

smothers him in flowers

…

[The Tyrians] marvel at Aeneas’s gifts, marvel at Iulus,

the god’s brilliant appearance and his deceptive words, 

[at the robe, and the cloak embroidered with yellow acanthus.]

The unfortunate Phoenician above all, doomed to future ruin,

cannot make up her mind and is inflamed by gazing,

equally moved by the child and by the gifts.

When he has hung around the neck of Aeneas in an embrace,

and sated the deceived father’s great love,

he seeks the queen; Dido coddles them with her eyes

and with her heart, unaware to how greatly the god enters into her misery;

but that one, remembering of his Cyprian mother, begins to erase Sychaeus,

and tries to seduce her minds, now long having been unstirred,

and her heart, unaccustomed, with living passion.

Venus had a specific reason for choosing Ascanius as the vessel for Cupid: since Ascanius was a child, he himself was a symbolic “token of the conjugal.” Dido, on the other hand, was left with no heir from her previous marriage with Sychaeus. Gutting suggests that her infamous epithet infelix Dido (referenced once in 1.712), can both refer to her “unhappiness” and her lack of child, as infelix also means “infertile.”  Dido’s maternal desire to create a family is compromised by her incomplete marriage. Through Freud’s lens, Dido naturally falls into the role of the “patient.” As a child, the receiver of maternal care, Ascanius would thus take on the position of the therapeutic “analyst,” providing Dido with a cure to her childlessness. Perhaps if there had been no divine intervention on Venus’s behalf, Ascanius’s presence, acting as proof of Aeneas’s fatherhood, might have led Dido to fall in love with Aeneas on a purely conjugal level, satisfying her motherly desire for a family. This theoretical but (ironically) more realistic scenario is fascinating as we take into consideration that Vergil never provides an explanation for where the real Ascanius is during Cupid’s ordeal. Erotic love is associated with illusion and disguise in the Aeneid, and it is worth the consideration that, instead of simply taking the place of Ascanius, Cupid and Ascanius may have somehow merged into one entity even before meeting Dido. But nevertheless, by using amor to displace the pure symbolism of children, Venus forcefully transforms Dido’s maternal instincts into a fabricated erotic desire for Aeneas, using his son as the conduit of erotic love, flooding the misguided Dido with such a large tide of unbridled erotic passion that she consequently loses hold of her conjugal/maternal duty. 

Currently disguised as Ascanius, Cupid approaches Dido with carae, “gifts.” These gifts are referred to earlier in the poem 1.648-55, with the palla and velamen of Helen (her undergarment and veil) receiving the most emphasis in the passage above. These are the only two objects specifically emphasized by Vergil, and both carry significant erotic undertones as tokens of Helen’s infidelity, symbolizing what Gutting considers “Venus’ greatest subordination of the conjugal to the erotic, that is, her defeat of Juno at the Judgment of Paris, a victory achieved by a promise to dissolve Helen’s marriage to Menelaus for the erotic enjoyment of Paris.” Dido reacts in two ways: expleri mentem nequit ardescitque tuendo: she cannot make good her mind and is inflamed by looking. Simply by gazing at Ascanius, Dido is metaphorically set on fire, a recurring metaphor for erotic love in the Aeneid. In his paper “Love as Death: The Pivoting Metaphor in Vergil’s Story of Dido,” classicist Richard Moorton explains fire’s erotic yet destructive function: Dido is metaphorically “burned” by her lust and is also literally “burned” on the pyre, creating a symbolic parallel between erotic love and the death of the version of Dido’s self that was sacred to her marriage. Regarding the phrase expleri mentem nequit, Gutting suggests that the word expleri should be considered in conjunction to its close synonym implevit, in the following phrase magnum falsi implevit genitoris amorem: “he (Cupid) fills up her great love for the deceived father.” The genitoris amor, love for the father, highlights Dido’s conjugal attraction toward Aeneas.

Implere, meaning to fill up or fulfill, also has a connotation with motherhood in the sense that it can be taken as to impregnate. Thus, when implere and explere are interpreted in the context of conjugal/maternal fulfillment, expleri mentem nequit highlights Dido’s inability to find this sense of fulfillment, a “wound that the presence of Ascanius/Cupid irritates.” Moorton further argues that Cupid/Ascanius’s adolescent appearance may invoke from Dido both the care of a mother and her latent erotic desire, creating a tense dynamic where Dido’s role as mother is awkwardly opposed by her role as an incensed erotic lover. The adjective falsi in “magnum falsi implevit genitoris amorem” complicates this further by breaking the wholesome familial bond with deception, reminding us that his apparent affection for Aeneas and Dido is faked for the sake of Venus’s ultimate goal: to shatter Dido’s fidelity by making her unintentionally project her erotic desires onto another man’s son. 

So, Cupid appeals to Dido’s maternal nature. He gives himself up to her, allowing the aspiring mother to satisfy her maternal affection through the physical senses (reginam petit haec oculis, haec pectore toto / haeret et interdum gremio fovet). Ironically, while Dido desperately clings onto Cupid/Ascanius, her physical caresses can only do so much. There remains a stark line between her physical expression of care and her emotional need for family, which she will never be able to achieve with Ascanius because he is fundamentally not and never will be her genuine son. Regardless, this is Cupid we’re talking about, not the actual Ascanius. The very nature of Dido’s relationship with him is deceptive. The more physically attached she becomes to Cupid/Ascanius, the more her latent erotic desires are stirred, which Dido ultimately “transfers” onto Aeneas. 

By exploiting Dido’s repressed desires, Venus’s plan works. In book 4, Dido’s attitude towards children takes a drastic change as Ascanius’s role as a conduit for Dido’s transferal of erotic love onto Aeneas ends up taking precedence over his chaste conjugal symbolism. Even when the real Ascanius returns, Dido is so overwhelmed by her erotic feelings that his presence becomes a mere “substitute for her erotic fixation on Aeneas: illum absens absentem auditque videtque, / aut gremio Ascanium genitoris imagine capta / detinet, infandum si fallere possit amorem,” meaning: “she, absent, hears and sees that absent one, / or she, having been captured by the image of his father, detains Ascanius in her bosom, / if it is possible to deceive abominable love.” The same erotic undertone occurs again during Dido’s fit of madness after Aeneas’s departure, when she wishes that she were pregnant by Aeneas: “saltem si qua mihi de te suscepta fuisset / ante fugam suboles, si quis mihi parvulus aula / luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret, / non equidem omnino capta ac deserta viderer,” which means, “if there was any offspring having been taken up for me by you / before your flight, if there was any small / Aeneas playing for me in my hall, whom you were calling back with your mouth, / I would not seem so utterly captured and deserted.” The phrase parvulus Aeneas draws a fascinating parallel to parvulus Torquatus in the aforementioned Catullus 61, both portraying the son as a “replica” of his father. Because Dido cannot have Aeneas herself, she wants to have his son as a reminder of the object of her erotic passion. Ascanius’s physical but also symbolic likeness to Aeneas makes Dido attracted to Ascanius and, by extension, his father. From Dido’s point of view, the role of children as conjugal tokens is officially displaced by erotic love.

In Book 4, Vergil concludes Dido’s story with her death. If her interaction with Cupid/Ascanius in Book 1 marked the moment when Dido is first infected with erotic passion, then the Dido we see at the beginning of Book 4 is already severely diseased. Vergil always uses destructive metaphors to characterize Dido’s lust, such as the previously mentioned fire, or wounds and poison. As Moorton states, there are many striking parallels between Dido’s erotic desires and her ultimate death at the pyre, the most notable being the symbolism of fire, which inflames her with passion, hurts her, and ultimately kills her. In Book 4, Vergil introduces the simile of Dido as a wounded deer, further sustaining the erotic and destructive symbolism of flamma (fire) and vulnus (injury): 

"est mollis flamma medullas

interea et tacitum vivit sub pectore vulnus.

uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur

urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerva sagitta,

quam procul incautam nemora inter Cresia fixit

pastor agens telis liquitque volatile ferrum

nescius: illa fuga silvas saltusque peragrat

Dictaeos: haeret lateri letalis harundo."

Meanwhile, there is a soft flame in her marrows

and the silent wound festers under her chest.

Unhappy Dido burns and wanders in the whole city,

burning, just as a deer having been struck by an arrow,

which an unknowing shepherd pierced between the Cresian groves,

driving, with darts and abandoned the swift steel: 

she wanders through the forests and Dictaean marshes in flight:

the lethal shaft hangs on her side.

Dido’s metaphorical fatal wound at the hands of the unassuming shepherd foreshadows her literal death at the burning pyre, just as Aeneas’s erotic impact on her causes her to spiral into her mental downfall. Her erotic impulses lead to her death in both a metaphorical and literal sense. Her self-destruction is metaphorical in the sense that, by abandoning her conjugal fidelity for erotic passion, she kills the part of her that is wife and mother, leaving behind only the passionate lover. The literal is self-explanatory—she goes up in flames.