Part of my study abroad trip to London and Rome in September is a series of blog posts about some assigned readings, and reflections upon them. This is the thirteenth such post, and is one of one about Virgil’s The Aenied.
“No goddess was your mother. Dardanus was not the founder of your family. Liar and cheat! Some rough Caucasian cliff begot you on flint. Hyrcanian tigresses tendered their teats to you. Why should I palter? Why still hold back for more indignity? Sigh, did he, while I wept? Or look at me? Or yield a tear, or pity her who loved him? What shall I say first,m with so much to say? The time is past when either supreme Juno or the Saturnian father viewed these things with justice. Faith can never be secure. I took the man in, thrown up on this coast in dire need, and in my madness then contrived a place for him in my domain, rescued his lost fleet, saved his shipmates’ lives. Oh, I am swept away burning by furies! Now the prophet Apollo, now his oracles, now the gods’ interpreter, if you please, send down by Jove himself, brings through the air his formidable comamnds! What fit employment for heaven’s high powers! I shall not detain you or dispute your story. Go, go after Italy on the sailing winds, look for your kingdom, cross the deepsea swell! If divine justice counts for anything, I hope and pray that on some grinding reef midway at sea you’ll drink your punishment an call and call on Dido’s name! From far away I shall come after you with my black fires, and when cold death has parted body from soul I shall be everywhere a shade to hant you! You will pay for this, unconscionable! I shall hear! The news will reach me even among the lowest of the dead!”
– except from Virgil’s The Aenied
So… Yeah… Dido is a little out-of-sorts at Aeneas. Just a little angry. Wonderful angry break-up speech though, no one really drips spite or scorn or turn a phrase like that anymore.
I’ve always wondered why at least this section of the Aeneid isn’t better known. Dido and Aeneas is one of those great classical stories of a woman scorned, or a romance gone badly, or the gods being dicks and bringing people together just to tear them apart again because they have plans and little regard for mortal love.
Purcell wrote the opera Dido and Aeanas and Christopher Marlowe wrote the play Dido, Queen of Carthage, but still the story feels rather overlooked today.
Then again, how many people today ever see an actual opera or can name a play that isn’t one of Shakespeare’s…
On my list of “Things To Do When I Actually Have Free Time Again” is to re-read The Illiad and The Odyssey and read all of The Aenied. Read abridged versions of Homer’s two works back in high school, and only disconnected bits and pieces of Virgil’s work. Knowing what I do now about Greek and Roman history, it would be interesting to read all of them again and see what else I can gain, see what bits I missed before, references that didn’t make sense to me when I read them in the past.
I know that The Aenied has a lot of weird anachronisms in it, iron-based weapons replacing the bronze ones of The Illiad for example, and that there were a number of half-lines in it due to Virgil having died while still writing it. But as a cultural founding myth it still appeals to me more than all the lies I was told as a kid about the pilgrims coming to the US.