Peter Davis looks at Ovid’s Virgilian heroine
‘The lucky author of your Aeneid united arms and the man in a Tyrian bed and no part of the whole work is read more.’ (Ovid, Tristia 2.533-5)
‘Virgil I only saw.’ (Ovid, Tristia 4.10.51)
Virgil’s Aeneid was problematic for Ovid. How should he, a great poet, engage with the previous generation’s greatest poem? And how should he, an erotic poet, respond to the epic’s most famous episode, the tale of Dido’s love for Aeneas? There were various possibilities. He could trivialise Dido’s story by reducing it to a summary and employing the barest possible language (as he did at Metamorphoses 14.78-81). Or he could invent a lengthy sequel and use it as an excuse for postponing consideration of the death of Julius Caesar (Fasti 3.543-656). Or he could explore the story’s implications by presenting it in detail from Dido’s perspective. This was the approach that Ovid took in Heroides 7.
Dido’s letter to Aeneas is unique among the single Heroides. While other heroines’ letters rewrite the works of long-dead authors—Homer or Euripides or Catullus—this one inserts itself into the work of a poet whom Ovid had seen and could have met. Written less than twenty years after Virgil’s death, Heroides 7, the earliest surviving literary response to the Aeneid, testifies to the epic’s classic status.
Virgil’s Dido has much to say to Aeneas. She is welcoming and generous in Book 1, offering to share her kingdom and begging him to tell his story. But all of this changes in Book 4 when she learns of his plan to abandon her and set sail for Italy. When she faces Aeneas she delivers two angry outbursts (Aeneid 4.305-30, 365-87), both notable for their rhetorical power. The openings of these speeches are telling. The first begins with lines remarkable for their hissing sibilants (305-6):
dissimulare etiam sperasti, perfide, tantum
posse nefas tacitusque mea decedere terra?
(Traitor, did you expect that you could suppress so great
a sin and leave my land in secret?)
while the second begins by accusing Aeneas of inhuman cruelty (365-6):
nec tibi diua parens generis nec Dardanus auctor,
perfide, sed duris genuit te cautibus horrens
Caucasus.
(No goddess was your mother, nor was Dardanus the founder of your family,
traitor, but stiff Caucasus gave birth to you on rugged crags.)
While their strategies are different, the speeches have one powerful word in common: perfide (‘traitor’). It seems obvious that Dido’s words are aimed at attacking Aeneas and not at changing his mind. And of course they don’t.
For many readers it is Dido’s passion, as expressed in these speeches and in her great soliloquies (534-52, 590-629), that makes Aeneid 4 so memorable. And so it is not surprising that some are disappointed when Ovid’s Dido is so different. Thus Jacobson, for example, in the first full-length study of Heroides, declared (Ovid's Heroides (1974) 76) that ‘this letter is a failure in its own right’, while Holzberg (Ovid. The Poet and His Work (2002) 81) claimed that ‘Dido is simply comic’.
I agree with neither of these judgments. It is not the passionate Dido of Aeneid 4 that Ovid attempts to emulate (what would be the point of that?), but the more rational Dido, the one who tries to persuade Aeneas to remain in Carthage. This rational Dido does not confront Aeneas herself. Rather she employs a go-between, her sister Anna, to approach her ‘enemy’ and she supplies persuasive arguments (416-36), contending that she has not harmed Aeneas or the Trojans, that he should wait until the weather has improved, that she will not insist on marriage or rob him of kingship in Latium, that she needs time to come to grips with her new circumstances. We should not be surprised that all of these arguments occur in Heroides 7, because, like Virgil’s Anna, Dido’s letter functions as an intermediary between the queen and her lover.
Scholars have rightly emphasised that Ovid’s Dido shows little understanding of Aeneas’ Roman mission. Holzberg has even criticised her for ‘misinterpreting the Aeneid’. (This seems a strange claim to make, if you reflect that how the Aeneid should be interpreted has been a hotly contested question for more than half a century.) But Aeneas himself shows little comprehension of his task in Aeneid 4. This is hardly surprising, given that he was not privy to Jupiter’s revelation in Book 1; and given that the advice offered by Hector (289-95) and Creusa (776-89) in Book 2 was so vague that our hero has spent seven years on a journey that should have taken no more than several weeks. He has even founded cities in the wrong place, in Thrace (3.17-18) and on Crete (3.132). Aeneas’ failure to grasp and internalise the gods’ plan perhaps explains why he is so shocked (4.276-8) when Mercury orders his departure. But if Aeneas shows little or no understanding of his task, how can Dido be expected to recognise its importance?
But what happens if we remove Aeneid’s ideological superstructure? What happens if we take away the imperative to found Rome? Then, I suggest, Aeneas’ departure for Italy becomes a mere personal betrayal. Aeneas becomes just another so-called hero, another Jason or Theseus, who abandons a woman that he ‘loves’. And that is how Ovid’s Dido sees Aeneas. For her, he is a man who breaks his promises (7-8, 57-8, 67-8, 81-2), a serial betrayer of women (17-18, 83-4), a man who deserts not only a lover but a legitimate wife (31, 69-70, 97-97a, 108, 167).
But even though Dido views Aeneas’ actions primarily in personal terms, she is able to offer a broader critique of the hero’s values and actions. After all, she has heard the narrative of Books 2 and 3, Aeneas’ account of his role in Troy’s fall and his subsequent wanderings. Consider Aeneas’ cardinal virtue, his sense of duty, his pietas. Dido may not have read the Aeneid’s proem, where the hero is said to be ‘pre-eminent in pietas’ (1.10), but she knows of Aeneas’ claim to pietas from Ilioneus (1.544-5) and from his own words (2.690, 3.480). How does she view this claim? From Dido’s perspective Aeneas is not so much ‘dutiful’ as thoroughly dishonest (7.81): omnia mentiris (‘you tell lies about everything’). And in evoking the classic image of Aeneas accompanied by his son and carrying his father, she displays nothing but sarcasm (7.107-8): ‘A goddess mother and an aged father, a son’s dutiful luggage [pia sarcina], gave me hope that, as is right, he would remain my husband’. pia here is said to be an example of a ‘transferred epithet’. But referring to Anchises with the dismissive term ‘luggage’ only highlights the fact that Dido refuses to call her lover pius.
And then there is the matter of Creusa. That Virgil’s Aeneas prizes the patriarchal line seems obvious when he carries his father (2.707-8, 721-3) and takes his son by the hand (710-11, 723-4), but makes his wife to follow at a distance (711, 724). Even if Aeneas claims to be distressed at her loss (745-6), it is not difficult to infer that he is at least partly responsible for Creusa’s death. And that is exactly the conclusion that Dido draws (83-4): ‘If you ask where lovely Iulus’ mother is, she died alone, abandoned by her hard-hearted husband’.
Perhaps more important—because they concern the nature of Aeneas’ mission and the whole of the epic’s second half—are the speculative questions that Dido raises about the future (15-16): ‘Suppose you discover this land, who will hand it over for you to have? Who will give their own territory to strangers to occupy?’ How does Dido know to ask such questions? Well, there is her own experience of establishing a city in hostile territory, of negotiating with hostile neighbours. And she has already heard evidence that, like many colonised lands, Italy is no terra nullius. Aeneas himself reported the Penates’ description of Hesperia as ‘powerful in battle’ (3.164) and Anchises’ interpretation of portents (3.539-40): ‘war … war … war’. But, most importantly, Dido has heard Helenus’ advice concerning the Sibyl (3.458-10): ‘She will tell you of the peoples of Italy and of wars to come and how and which labours you should shun or endure’.
The questions that Dido poses concerning Aeneas’ future are of course rhetorical because they imply obvious answers: no one will simply hand over their land; no one will simply allow strangers to occupy their territory. While Dido has not read the Aeneid, we have. The last six books of the epic constitute evidence that she is right. Yes, there will be someone else for Aeneas to love (cf. 17-18). But she will not love Aeneas as Dido does (cf. 22). Indeed she will not even meet Aeneas in the Aeneid and whether she will love Aeneas is an open question.
Dido does not misinterpret the Aeneid. Even if we agree with Jacobson and Holzberg (and I don’t), that Aeneas’ decision to abandon Dido is essentially right and that Roman destiny trumps individual suffering, it has to be acknowledged that Ovid’s Dido brilliantly exposes the fissures and flaws in Aeneas’ case and offers a powerful critique of his actions and his destiny.
Peter Davis is a Visiting Research Fellow in Classics at the University of Adelaide. He is primarily interested in the Latin poetry of the first centuries BCE and CE. He is currently writing a commentary on a selection of Ovid’s single Heroides. He is the author of books on Senecan tragedy (Shifting Song: The Chorus in Seneca’s Tragedies [1993], Seneca: Thyestes [2003]) and Ovid (Ovid and Augustus: A Political Reading of Ovid’s Erotic Poetry [2006]); and co-editor (with Han Baltussen) of The Art of Veiled Speech. Self-Censorship from Aristophanes to Hobbes (2015). His most recent work is Valerius Flaccus Argonautica Book 7. Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (2020). His new book Ovid Amores Book 3. Edited with Introduction, Translation, and Commentary will be published by Oxford University Press in November 2023.
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