ARTicles vol. 3 i.2b: Dido’s Passion

Since her appearance in Book Four of Virgil’s Aeneidin 19 B.C.E., the Carthaginian Queen Dido has become a touchstone for artists to express society’s changing attitudes towards women, love, and politics. In the fifth century C.E., the Roman critic Ambrosius Macrobius wrote: “the story of Dido’s passion … so wings its way, as truth, through the lips of all men, that painters and sculptors and those who represent human figures in tapestry take it for their theme in preference to any other … and actors too, no less, never cease to celebrate the story with gesture and in song.” The fullness of her character left the door open to controversial interpretations: powerful ruler, faithful widow, lustful siren, and wronged woman. Virgil created the story of Dido and Aeneas as part of a political project. Only a century before, Rome had averted destruction at the hands of Carthage. Lasting 120 brutal years, the Punic Wars ended with Rome gaining control of the Mediterranean by crushing its North African enemy. The Romans of Virgil’s time still thought of the Carthaginians as savages, stressing their reputation for human sacrifice. At times, Dido resembles Euripides’ Medea, threatening to dismember her Trojan lover Aeneas, to sacrifice Aeneas’ young son Ascanius, and to burn the Trojans in their ships if they try to leave. Before her suicide, she calls upon her Gods to set eternal hate between her city and Rome, the place Aeneas founds after leaving her. Virgil presents the contrast between the reasonable, temperate Aeneas and the lustful, violent Dido as a proof of Rome’s superiority. And only ten years before, the political crisis provoked by Antony’s dalliance with another African Queen, Cleopatra, demonstrated the dangers of sacrificing duty to love. Despite his political motives, however, Virgil also makes Dido a human and complex character. Not simply a temptress, she reminds Aeneas of his promises to marry her. She feels betrayed by Aeneas and unfaithful to her late husband. A prototypical wronged woman, she accuses Aeneas of losing interest in her and making his cowardly escape to avoid being tied down. Another Roman poet, Ovid, presented an even more sympathetic Dido only a few years after Virgil’s. In Heroides, Dido writes a suicide note to Aeneas, trying to hurt him as much through her death as he has by leaving her. Shame, anger, and love fight within her, and this conflict evokes pity. Most readers of this text would blame Aeneas for abandoning Dido, and so Ovid succeeds in rehabilitating this enemy of Rome by exciting the sympathies of his audience. Although the story of Dido remained popular throughout the Middle Ages, it gained unusual relevance in Elizabethan England. The questions of female leadership raised by Dido resonated with the subjects of Elizabeth; they feared the rule of a woman and wanted a male heir to the line of Tudor, but at the same time they worried that any foreign prince she married would exert influence over England in a time of religious and political upheaval. Many writers compared the powerful Elizabeth to Elissa, the Phoenician queen who traveled to North Africa after the death of her husband, changed her name to Dido (“Wanderer”), and founded Carthage on her own. William Gager’s 1583 play Didopraises Elizabeth for her chastity and wisdom, contrasting it with Dido’s uncontrolled passion. While Elizabeth uses marriage as a bargaining chip and refuses to cede control to her suitors, Dido lets her love disrupt her governance of Carthage. Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 play Dido, Queen of Carthageappropriates much of Virgil’s language and characterization while amplifying one theme central to Marlowe’s writing: desire. As in The Aeneid, capricious gods guide the ill-fated romance, but this Dido falls for Aeneas even before Cupid influences her. She shows Aeneas a portrait gallery of her rejected suitors not as a demonstration of her self-control but of her desirability. Swept up by desire, she offers him her late husband’s robes, her throne, rule of her city, untold riches, and her body. Torn between love and hate for Aeneas, “truest Dido” kills herself in a deadly variation on the desire that first drew her to him. When the story of Dido made its way into opera, portrayals focused more on questions of female desire than of female leadership. In La Didone, Busenello and Cavalli’s 1641 opera, Dido undergoes a crisis of conscience. Shamed by her desire, she repents her unreasonable behavior. In a stunning departure from The Aeneid, this Dido marries her suitor Iarbas instead of killing herself! Busenello was a member of the Incogniti, an intellectual society of Venetian noblemen obsessed with chastity, and the opera reflects their skepticism and moral outrage on the subject of female lust. The happy ending demonstrated that a sinful woman could mend her ways. When Dido marries and returns to reason, she restores her society to health. Henry Purcell’s 1689 opera Dido and Aeneasalso portrays Dido’s constancy and chastity, not surprising for a work originally performed at a girls’ school. Purcell’s sympathetic Dido falls prey to a Sorceress’ whims and Aeneas’ promises, first resisting, then regretting falling in love. “Earth and Heaven conspire my fall,” she sings. When Aeneas tries to explain his departure, she begs him to leave quickly and let her die. In contrast to Virgil or Marlowe’s versions, this Dido makes no attempt to keep Aeneas or avoid her fate. Humble in abandonment, the once-great Queen begs her listeners to “Remember me, but ah! Forget my fate.” She dies in shame at her own weakness, suffering not from intemperate lust but from the malevolence of fate. The visual arts deemphasized the influence of fate or gods on Dido’s downfall in favor of dramatizing emotional resonance. Because painting depicts a frozen moment, artists chose particularly dramatic or complex moments from the story. In his 1747 painting Aeneas Leaving Dido, Pompeo Batoni shows Aeneas’ determination to leave mixed with sadness, and Dido’s hopeful plea tempered by despair at her abandonment. Alexander Runciman sets his 1770 drawing Dido Watching the Departing Shipsmoments later, as Dido reclines on the sea-shore. Gazing longingly and hatefully over her shoulder at Aeneas’ ships, her hand grasps Aeneas’ sword in anticipation of suicide. And Peter Paul Rubens paints the climactic moment in The Death of Dido(1640), as the queen aims the sword at her heart. Sitting on a pile of Aeneas’ possessions, she looks to the heavens with fear and resolution. The last great depiction of Dido follows this emotional bent. Hector Berlioz’s 1858 opera Les Troyens(The Trojans) creates a world uninfluenced by gods, with Aeneas urged to sail to Italy by ghosts and offstage cries of “Italy!” Following the text of his idol Virgil closely, Berlioz nonetheless follows his other idol, Shakespeare, in deep psychological characterization. A true Romantic, Berlioz borrows the lyrics for the Dido-Aeneas love scene directly from the Jessica-Lorenzo love scene in The Merchant of Venice. Pastoral romance gives way to passionate suffering when, after her abandonment, Dido wildly bemoans her “soul chained to its love.” At last, regaining her regal composure, she dies clutching Aeneas’s armor. Dido has appeared less frequently since Berlioz, warranting only brief mentions by Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. African writers and female poets are beginning to rediscover her as a resonant figure for questions of power and love, but more than a century has passed since a major artistic depiction of Dido. Perhaps The Aeneid has lost its centrality in our culture, and its heroine with it. But even today, so distant from Virgil’s time, few other love stories offer the same emotional complexity. Few ancient women shine as indelibly through the centuries as Dido, Queen of Carthage. Akiva Fox is a second-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.