Some Devices of Drama used in 1—4

A paper read to the Society, February 1974, # by Jonathan Foster, M.A., B.Phil.'

# That the episode of (one might say the whole unit books 1 —4 of the Aeneid) is worked out very much in the spirit of Greek tragedy was remarked by Henry Nettleship ninety-nine years ago. * I cannot therefore lay claim to novelty in my choice of subject, nor yet do I intend simply to rearrange kaleidoscopically the many detailed discussions of this subject which can be found in various places, notably in what I like to think of as Pease’s Chrestomathy, that is to say his introduction to his massive commentary on book 4. 2 Austin’s and Williams’s commentaries on the individual books, Austin’s article on the Wooden Horse, 3 and Michael Wigodsky’s ‘Vergil and Early Latin Poetry,’4 (which has some helpful remarks on Virgil and Greek tragedy also) are all distinguished contributors in this field. At the same time, and with the greatest possible respect to one of our Vice- Presidents, Dr Michael Grant, I feel bound to protest in the strongest terms at the suggestion which he makes twice on one page of his recent book ‘Roman Myths’ 5, that there may have been some tragic play on the subject of Dido and in existence when Virgil wrote: better to accept his reservation that such an hypothesis may well be an unfounded reflection on Virgil’s originality. True, we all recognize that the Aeneid is an inspired synthesis, and I shall presently make a suggestion of my own about Virgil’s relationship to contemporary Roman drama.

My recent predecessor on this rostrum, Mr E.L. Harrison, 6 explored ‘with learn­ ing and ability’, as Sellar said of Conington, the reason why Venus in that part of book 1 (314-417) where she meets Aeneas in her disguise as a Tyrian huntress should have worn the cothurnus. His conclusion, following the admirable method of Viktor Poschl, is that Virgil chose a booted rather than a sandalled figure for the disguise so that by placing the line 337 purpureoque alte suras vincire cothurno where it is he might make of the word cothurno a symbol signalizing the immediately following ‘tragic prologue’. As Mr Harrison points out, this corresponds to the sort of divine prologue which is so common in Greek tragedy: he instances Aphrodite’s in Euripides’ Hippolytus. (Let us keep that example in mind for subsequent reference.) I agree with Mr Harrison that we should not be surprised that Venus disguises herself before trespassing on the Punica regna, the preserve of her arch-opponent Juno: yet, that she reveals herself to her son only when her mission is complete and it is too late for Juno to do anything about it, seems to me to represent only a part of the truth. There is an element of ambiguity and mystification about the whole scene, which may be not unrelated to the likelihood (which I have demonstrated elsewhere 7) that Virgil modelled his ghost-scene on that classic ghost-scene which gave its title to Plautus’s Mostellaria, the scene in which Tranio solemnly seeks to hoodwink old Theopropides. Mr. Harrison’s con­ clusions about the ‘divine prologue’ and my contention that the central passage is based on

28 the New Comedy sit well together: the scene in Plautus, though not a prologue, is in the expository style in which prologues are written. My first contention is that Virgil meant us to regard the family of the Tyrian king whom he called Belus, that is to say Dido, Anna and Pygmalion, as a tragic house like, say, that of Pelops, of Atreus or of Laomedon. Venus tells how the ghost of Sychaeus came to Dido in a dream, ‘caecumque domus scelus omne retexit’ (356). Later Venus sends Cupid as a substitute for little Ascanius (657ff.) Why? ‘Quippe domum timet ambiguam Tyriosque bilingues.’ In book 4 (318) Dido pleads with Aeneas, ‘miserere domus labentis’: this means more than just ‘the house is already falling now that Aeneas no longer upholds it’ (as Austin glosses it). We are dealing with the fall of the house of Belus. Now, in terms of tragedy, why does a 66/ua«; fall? In the words which Ismene addresses to the blinded Oedipus in the Oedipus Coloneus (369f.) because of ‘that old ancestral curse such as got hold of (Oedipus’s) house to its misery’. What is the usual cause of such a fall, and why does furor come between the members of a family as it did to the Belids?

At Oedipus Tyrannus 883ff. the Chorus calls down an imprecation on arrogance in deed and word shown by a man with no fear of Dike and no respect for the habitations of the Gods, the man who will not win his advantage fairly and abstain from impious conduct, the man who violates the sanctity of holy things. That Pygmalion belongs in this ghastly company is evident enough, but how did it all begin? In Virgil’s words from another context, quo numine laeso? In the case of the Belids the answer is, I submit, Venus. If it is Venus, as I hope to show, then here is another reason for her disguise, other than Homeric motif or the desire to escape Juno’s notice: she gives a summary account of the family of Dido, with no mention of her father, only ‘summa....fastigia rerum’ (342). But ‘longa est iniuria, longae/ambages’. Venus I believe knows a lot more than she discloses to Aeneas at this stage: what she tells of Dido in the person of the sensuous Tyrian girl arouses Aeneas’s sympathy and compassion, perhaps even paves the way for his liaison with her. Venus, though there is no indication that she intended the two to meet, turns Juno’s stratagem of wrecking Aeneas at Carthage to the destruction of Dido. How then can we be sure that Venus is behind this family curse, just as Juno is Teucris addita? Dido’s celebrated speech to Aeneas, when he has emerged radiant from the mist-cloud, ends with the words

non ignara mali miseris succurrere disco

(630). This looks like a reminiscence of Orestes’ words in Aeschylus’ Eumenides (276ff.) ‘Schooled in misfortunes I understand many purifications, both when it is right to speak and when to be silent’. Dido acts in a way which is entirely true to life. The meeting with a celebrity generally elicits the declaration ‘I have heard so much about you’. Dido has heard Ajax’s half-brother Teucer, though himself a Greek, speak proudly of the Trojan blood he has from his mother Hesione, Priam’s sister, child of Laomedon. But poor Dido does not like Orestes in Aeschylus (though perhaps this is simply fancy on my part) know when to be silent: call it ebullience on her part, or is it that Venus is already simultaneously

29 at work; Dido, in a way that is redolent of tragic irony, lets out words that must have taken the original audience’s breath away: genitor turn Belus opimam vastabat Cyprum (62If.): her father was at that time making of rich Cyprus a waste land. I cannot believe that this is an idle detail: opimam vastabat, the antithesis is so pointed, the vandalism so flagrant. Not ‘was fighting a war in Cyprus’: is not this the primeval affront to the diva potens Cypri (Horace Odes 1.3.1) which we have been looking for? To emphasize the point Virgil shows Venus soaring off to Paphos at 415 after her disguised interview with Aeneas, and then spiriting Ascanius away to Idalium, her retreat in Cyprus, for the duration of the Carthaginian feast (691 ff.) This to my mind is the aition of the tragedy of the house of Belus. It is not surprising that there is no source other than Virgil for this connection between Teucer and Belus. Virgil, as Professor Williams states in his recent commentary, has most probably invented it, with the intention, I would submit, of lending dramatic verisimilitude to the disclosure which, in terms of the theology of tragedy, justifies the antagonism of Venus to the Belids. That Aeneas makes no reaction in palpable terms to this disclosure does not mean that the reader should ignore it. It may be instructive to note that in Justin’s version of the Dido story (18.5.4f.), which of course makes no reference to Aeneas, Dido kidnapped, as Romulus did the Sabine women, eighty girls from Cyprus, who were earning their dowries by sacred prostitution as Venus’s votaries.. Again an offence against Venus. If Justin and Timaeus had the same source, then Virgil has opted for a more dramatically tractable offence against Venus than the prose tradition could offer him.

In this light the furor of Pygmalion resulting in the cruel loss of Dido’s beloved Sychaeus and her scrupulous, not to say obsessive, widowhood which paves the way for her tragic liaison with Aeneas was not without a previous cause. It is quite characteristic of the tragic manner - and contributes to achieving suspense — for the dark secrets of the house and its transmitted guilt to be initially only adumbrated: in Agamemnon for example, as Professor Lloyd-Jones has recently pointed out 8, the original secret of the house of Atreus is brought out into the open only two thirds of the way through, and then by Cassandra. Let me return to the Hippolythus prologue with the question ‘Can Dido be analogous to Phaedra and Hippolytus at once?’ Hippolytus, as Aphrodite tells us (13ff.), calls Aphrodite ‘the most pernicious of the heavenly powers, he abhors the bed of love, marriage he renounces, and honours ’s sister Artemis, daughter of Zeus.’ He has also to suffer, through his father’s curse, as he tells us (137ff.) ‘the hellish heritage of bloodguiltiness won by forgotten ancestors.’ Dido tells Anna she could perhaps have brought herself to bow her head to infidelity to Sychaeus’ memory -

si non pertaesum thalami taedaeque fuisset

(4.18): it seems, one might object, an odd thing for a faithful univira to say that she is

30 ‘thoroughly sick’ of the whole idea of marriage and weddings. Anna anxiously asks her ‘nec dulcis natos Veneris nec praemia noris?' (33). These words, touching when taken at face value, have, as I have shown elsewhere 9, their origin in Lucretius. At the same time, they contain one of those amphibologies which are a frequent device in Greek tragedy: at this precise moment Dido would be best off knowing nothing of Venus and her rewards: there is an ominous echo of 1.603ff. where Aeneas says di tibi, si qua pios respectant numina... praemia digna ferant. Dido’s reward for her humane welcome and candid offer to share her kingdom with the Trojans is to become, through Venus’s agency, infelix, pesti devota futurae (712), and then, by a connivance between ruseful Venus and Juno, who tries to thwart the Trojan destiny, to be thrown into Aeneas’s arms in the cave during the Royal Hunt and Storm. I cannot believe that Virgil means us to think that Venus does this simply to be doubly sure of Aeneas’s safety from the legendary Punica fides: Juppiter has already assured Venus of the great future the Julian gens will have in Italy: manent immota tuorum/fata tibi (257f.) She sets about destroying Dido for a number of reasons, first, in tragic terms, because of guilt inherited from Belus, and second, in a way that shows Venus’s power and that of her son Cupid - one is tempted to add ‘and of her son Aeneas’, for slighting Venus (an offence which is presumably preconditioned by the first cause.) Then third, because Dido is Juno’s special favourite, as Aeneas is hers. Thus the motives and justifications for Venus’s opposition to Carthage and Dido are analogous to those for Juno’s to the Trojans and Aeneas, at once dynastic, Roman/Carthaginian, and tragic/mythical, Greek/Trojan.

Venus punishes Dido with Cupid aiding and abetting, and Aeneas ultimately having his pietas gravely strained, not to speak of his acute if unflamboyant anguish at parting from Dido, multa gemens magnoque animum labefactus amore (4.395).

The ambivalence of Venus as Aphrodite and the Julian Venus Genetrix is one of the most remarkable features of this part of the poem, as is that of Aeneas as the son of the love- goddess and the father of the Roman race: the two do not always seem entirely coextensive. In suggesting as I did that there is a comparison to be made between Dido and Hippolytus and Phaedra, I have in mind that Phaedra inherited from her mother Pasiphae the curse of Aphrodite such that the goddess simply states in her prologue (27f.) ‘And a terrible lust, by my contrivance, captured her heart.’

The original hubris of Belus towards Venus is followed by ate, which seems to be what Virgil means by furor (1.348). O. Schroeder, quoted by Fraenkel on Agamemnon 1192, defines ate as the word which comprises mental blindness, guilt and harm or damage. The song of the Erinys is of ate which is the first initiator, and, in the famous parodos of the Agamemnon (22If.), ‘mortals are made bold by base-counselling rash infatuation, the beginning of woe.’ When Dido is emboldened by the ‘decisive pantomime of the erotic

31 meeting’, in von Hofmannsthal’s phrase, to cease to be concerned about appearance or reputation, and to hide her infidelity to Sychaeus behind a respectable facade of marriage, as she calls it, then (4.169f.) ille dies primus leti primusque malorum causa fuit. In these words Virgil speaks like the tragic chorus: that day was the beginning of woe. At another level this is the megale hamartia of Aristotle 10. Her love is no longer a secret between herself and Anna: she believes herself married and acts accordingly. This is the point of no return.

I must hurriedly forestall the objection that I am misguidedly treating ate as though it were the exclusive property of tragedy: of course it is not. It, or its equivalent described in other words, is a concept fully-fledged already in , indeed so much a part of the accepted way of thinking and talking about human motivation that sometimes it seems to be scarcely more than a fagon de parler with little or no entailment, at any rate certainly not what one would call tragic import: for example in Iliad 6 (234f.) the poet observes that Zeus must have robbed Glaucus of his wits for he exchanged with Diomedes golden armour for bronze, where it is as if he said ‘He must have been off his head.’ Very differently, however 11, in book 19 (86ff.) Agamemnon makes an apology for his behaviour towards Achilles, saying that it was Zeus and his Portion and the Erinys that stalks in dark­ ness who in the assembly put savage ate into his mind, and further declaring that even Zeus is liable to ate. Later Achilles accounts for his behaviour in similar terms at 19.270ff.: ‘Father Zeus, great are the atae you send upon men. Never would Agamemnon so long have stirred the thumos within my breast...... but Zeus wanted death to come to many of the Achaeans.’

For all that ate comes on Agamemnon it is not stated to have anything to do with the inherited guilt of the Atreids: in the Iliad, as opposed to the Odyssey, the gods will send ate to take away a man’s wits when they aim to destroy him; the matter of punishment is not a prerequisite 12.

When Virgil says of the house of Belus lquos inter medius venit furor' (1.348) he is continuing with what has already established itself as a Leitm otiv or key concept of the poem, as Brooks Otis has shown I3. At 1.148ff. the first simile of the poem compares the waves being calmed by Neptune to an unruly rabble, to whom furor arma ministrat, being silenced when it catches sight of a statesman pietate gravem ac mentis. So, at the end of Juppiter’s prophecies to Venus (294ff.), Furor impius is shown chained up in the temple of Janus. The idea of furor as the madness which militates against pietas and sets brothers at each other’s throats seems, not, unnaturally, to have been particularly insistent with the poets who contemplated the aftermath of the Civil Wars: it occurs repeatedly in Horace, as in the Quo quo scelesti ruitis epode (7.13f.) furome caecus an rapit vis acrior an culpa? In the Georgies this impiety is variously represented as originating with Romulus and Remus

32 (I think this is implied at 2.533), or as going back as far as the peijuries of Laomedon, for which his descendants are still paying (1.50Iff.), a motif also found in Horace’s Odes, 3.3.21 ff.

The words furor and furere (etymologically akin to the Greek thumos used in Homeric psychopathology of infatuation) are repeatedly associated in Cicero with tragic figures: Athamas, Alcmaeon, Ajax and Orestes are grouped together as evincing furor in the sense mentis ad omnia caecitatem 14. And Seneca is a frequent user of both words in his tragedies and philosophy, cf. Hercules Furens 1240, furore cessit exstinctus pudor the last two words being quoted literally from Dido’s speech at Aeneid 4.322. Unfortunately the remains of early Roman tragedy are not extensive enough to allow any examination of the occurrence of furor and furere in them, although Cicero’s evidence quoted above coupled with Seneca’s wide use of the words is emboldening. To feel the contemporary pulse of literature when Virgil was writing we need to know what kind of poetry he heard and read as well as what he wrote. We know a great deal about Horace and we know that Varius, the artistically precocious associate of Virgil and Horace, composed a Thyestes for dramatic presentation at the celebrations in 29 of the victory at Actium. Given the preoccupation with furor that I have illustrated in what one might term Octavian poetry, it is reasonable to suppose that Varius stressed its workings in his play, which Quintilian (x.1.98) maintains could stand comparison with any Greek tragedy one cared to mention. One is reluctant to repeat the old cliche that Varius’s play will have been of the Senecan type, even if that implies what it once did. declares to his friend Cerrinus that Virgil yielded to Varius the renown of the Roman buskin, though he had it in him to give more powerful utterance in the tragic manner (8.18.7f.): et Vario cessit Romani laude cothurni cum posset tragico fortius ore loqui. I do not want to overstate my case and appear to believe that Virgil was really a tragedian writing epic, and yet the precedent — and the influence — of , who wrote both, looms large. I said at the outset that I regard books 1—4 as a unit: Austin has rightly insisted on the importance of book 1 in connection with the tragedy of Dido: Quinn’s idea of book 4 as a tragedy in three acts 15, each introduced by the words at regina, is schematically neat but does not stand up to scrutiny: at regina keeps recurring because we keep going back to the queen. I would maintain that books 2 and 3 are integral to the ‘tragedy’ as Virgil finally presented it. There is, as V. Ussani Jr. has pointed out 16, a resemblance between book 2 and a messenger speech: we notice Aeneas’s words at 506ff. forsitan et Priami fuerint quae fata requiras. urbis uti captae casum convulsaque vidit limina tectorum...... Here Professor Austin comments that Virgil has modified the type of question conventional

33 in a Greek tragedy when a messenger announces a disaster, put by the person to whom he first comes with the news: in Virgil the messenger himself forestalls the question. In Greek, the messenger’s narration, or an important subdivision of it, as at 507ff., begins with an epei clause: so Virgil begins his with the uti....vidit clause. I note that this procedure had already been established in Latin drama: at Plautus, Amphitruo 203f., when Sosia rehearses his account of the battle between the Thebans and the Teloboians, he starts:

Principio ut illo advenimus, ubi primum terram tetigimus, continuo Amphitruo deligit viros primorum principes. So Dido hangs on the messenger’s every word, as 506 reminds us, though the direct address can bring the reader up with a jolt if he fails to integrate the book into its dramatic context. All through books 2 and 3 infelix Dido was succumbing to Cupid, ‘longumque bibebat amorem' (1.749). So, when 4 begins, she is ‘gravi iamdudum saucia cura. Throughout Aeneas’s massive and positively Wagnerian narration her wound of love — the letalis harundo of the stricken deer simile — is progressively festering within her veins as she gazes and listens. For there are many points of similarity between their experiences, as emerges from Aeneas’s narration: loss of homeland, of dearest beloved; the Polydorus story, (deriving in essence from the account his eidolon gives in the prologue to Euripides’ Hecuba, yet with grim supernatural elements of metamorphosis of an almost Ovidian cast which are probably Virgil’s own invention), bears a striking resemblance to the account of the murder of Sychaeus in book 1, although, as I have already mentioned, there seems to be clear Plautine influence there. In both cases auri sacra fames caused a man to repudiate fas or pietas and to defile himself with bloodguilt: crudelis aras (1.355) paralleled by crudelis terras (3.44). Equally Priam’s ingenuous offer to Sinon ‘noster eris’ (2.149) is comparable to Dido’s to the Trojans: both are to suffer cruelly for their openheartedness, openhearted­ ness that comes ironically from the child of Laomedon and the founder of the race to be stigmatized for its bad faith respectively. And in regard to the similarity of Dido and Aeneas let us look for a moment near to the very end of her life when she utters the famous imprecation plighting the Carthaginians to perpetual enmity with the Romans (4.625):

exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.

Here Virgil refers unmistakably (see Pease and Fraenkel ad locc.) to the line of the Agamemnon (1200) where Cassandra, near the end of her life, when she is about to die with Agamemnon, says ‘for there shall come in turn another to avenge us’; the primary reference is, of course, to Orestes, but Virgil could view this with the hindsight of an Augustan in the light of the prophecy he puts into the mouth of Juppiter (1.283ff.), veniet lustris labentibus aetas cum domus Assaraci Phthiam clarasque Mycenas servitio premet ac victis dominabitur Argis.

The ultimate avenger of Cassandra is Aeneas, whose descendants the Aeneadae defeated

34 Dido’s avenger and his Carthaginians: this amount of irony is implicit in the words Virgil makes Dido utter.

This artistic contrivance of words which have a special significance for their auditors, and which involves an anachronistic manipulation of situations, is notably and appositely exemplified by the words Hector Berlioz gave his Dido and Aeneas to sing in their love duet in act 4 of , where Dido sings Par une telle nuit, le front ceint de cytise, votre mere Venus suivit le bel Anchise aux bosquets de l’lda. Shakespeare’s ‘In such a night as this’ sequence is extrapolated back into the original context of Dido and Aeneas in Lorenzo and Jessica’s amoebaic sequence in the Merchant o f Venice, again with irony, for there Dido is seeking to ‘waft her love/ to come again to Carthage’. There is great irony in the reversal, if one may use that word, whereby Dido changes her life-style completely from chaste widowhood to infatuated ‘marriage’ with Aeneas, in that, had other things been equal, this marriage was the right solution for her. And this is Anna’s tragedy too: she is, after all, another member of the house of Belus. At the beginning of book 4 she gives Dido the encouragement Dido so desires and yet is initially reluctant to take; her advice, given in normal circumstances, would be the right advice for a normal woman to take. Dido gives in to Anna’s conventional — and entirely practical - arguments, in spite of her initial hyperbole, that oath which Greek tragedians and rhetoricians and Seneca in his tragedies developed out of a Homeric formula {Iliad 4.182 &c.) sed mihi vel tellus optem prius ima dehiscat, vel pater omnipotens adigat me fulmine ad umbras, pallentis umbras Erebi noctemque profundam, ante, pudor, quam te violo aut tua iura resolvo. (4.24ff.)

For, within 28 lines, Anna

his dictis.... spemque dedit dubiae menti solvitque pudorem.

Dido’s ready acceptance of these persuasions is a measure of her furor: Agamemnon succumbed to the temptation held out to him by Clytemnestra to walk on the purple tapestries — and for the same reason - because his wits had been taken away. Thus Anna contributes to her sister’s downfall. Together they seek to defy the destiny of Aeneas which has been set forth quite unequivocally for them in his narration. In the underworld in book 6 the chides Palinurus for his comparable desire to be admitted across the Styx though unburied (376): desine fata deum flecti sperare precando. Anna is desperately wrong in the first part of her assessment of the situation (4.45f.)

35 dis equidem auspicibus reor et Iunone secunda hunc cursum Iliacas vento tenuisse carinas.

When she urges Dido (50)

tu modo posce deos veniam sacrisque litatis indulge hospitio causasque innecte morandi

(note the modo which seems to imply that the whole thing is simple), the venia, like the pax at 56, is the gods’ blessing for Dido’s changed intention. She hopes to defy destiny, at least to manipulate it. All this under the influence o f furor. We remember once again that she is a member of the tragic Belid family. And thus there is an additional cause pre­ determining that Anna, like the nurse in Hippolytus, in seeking the happiness of her loved one, in fact encompasses her deepest misery. As Heinze has shown *', Anna belongs in the dramatic category of the Vertraute, not in the epic one of such as Medea’s Chalciope. Dido recognizes at the end what Anna has done (548ff.); tu lacrirnis evicta meis, tu prima furentem his, germana, malis oneras atque obicis hosti. This is not Anna’s only tragic mistake, however. She is easily induced by Dido to prepare the pyre for the pretended magic rites. She misconceives the situation (500ff.): non tamen Anna novis praetexere (again that word of Dido, cf. 4.172) funera sacris germanam credit nec tantos mente furores concipit aut graviora timet quam morte Sychaei. ergo iussa parat. But how can Pease (ad loc.) speak of the ‘matter-of-fact, rather coarse nature of Anna’? direct, uncomplicated, even blunt at times, but of coarseness she is to be absolved not least for such a thought as solane perpetua maerens carpere iuventa? (4.32), where the very word sola seems to characterize Anna, for with her unanima soror (4.8) Dido, though a widow, is never alone. That Dido’s reproaches resemble those uttered by Medea in Euripides’ play, that her madness has points of similarity to that of Orestes, also in Euripides, and that her suicide recalls that of Sophocles’ Ajax, the only figure in extant Greek tragedy to commit suicide on stage: all these are valuable relationships with drama, but they have been examined elsewhere and further discussion would be unprofitable here.

Dido, recognizing her tragic madness, ‘quid loquor? aut ubi sum? quae mentem insania m utat?’ (595), deplores her facta impia: we note once more furor working against pietas. She surveys her missed opportunities of grisly revenge (600ff.)

36. non potui abreptum divellere corpus et undis spargere? non socios, non ipsum absumere ferro Ascanium, patriisque epulandum ponere mensis?

She might have emulated Medea (this is not the form of the story used by Apollonius). She might have emulated Atreus, the host at the Thyestean banquet. Even more impressive, because of its amazing modernity, is the description of Dido’s nightmares (465ff.), of her being pursued by a wild Aeneas * ® and going on a long journey alone and lost. Medea’s dream in Apollonius book 3 in no way probes her subconscious like this. Virgil illuminates her mental state in an extended simile (469ff.): Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus et solem geminum et duplices se ostendere Thebas, aut Agamemnonius scaenis agitatus Orestes armatam facibus matrem et serpentibus atris cum fugit, ultricesque sedent in limine Dirae. Dido’s awareness of her guilt and her tragic madness are borne out by these comparisons with archetypal figures of tragedy, Greek and Roman. The phrase scaenis agitatus has provoked discussion: to Page the comparison with the stage suggests unreality, to others a sham. But surely by putting these specifically on the stage Virgil for a moment ceases to treat Dido simply as a literary heroine, in the same sphere as Orestes, who, after all, figures in the narrative at 3.331. At this point she is a real-life creature, although her tragedy is as striking as that of these theatrical paradigms.

The comparison elucidates the following ‘ergo ubi concepitfurias', which seems to mean ‘so, when she had submitted to possession by the Furies’: this is what the analogy with Pentheus and Orestes betokens: ‘conceived a criminal madness’ (Day Lewis) is not quite enough. The choice of tragic figures is apposite: Pentheus had sought to reject a great power, as did Dido, while Orestes was driven on by a family Erinys to vengeance. Dido had done all she could as a woman with no male kin to assist her to avenge the murder of Sychaeus (4.656): ulta virum poenas inimico a fratre recepi.

If poenas is taken in its original sense of blood-money this is entirely true in so far as Dido has deprived the avaricious Pygmalion of a secret hoard of silver and gold (1.359). She does not perpetuate the blood-feud, nor does she, unlike Pygmalion, merit the punish­ ment of Tartarus (6.608 and 610): hie quibus invisi fratres, dum vita manebat.. aut qui divitiis soli incubuere repertis for she describes her brother as inimico not inviso, unfriendly not hated. But the effect of the Erinys is still there, there is a neglected side to her pietas: non servata fides cineri promissa Sychaeo. (4.552).

37 There is a mysterious pendant to the tragedy of Dido: the departing Trojans, when they see the flames of her pyre, though they do not know the cause, have grave mis­ givings, caused by the knowledge of what a woman is capable of when she is visited with furor,

notum...furens quid femina possit (5.6). Did they acquire this knowledge while they were at Carthage, or does Virgil for a moment make his Trojans connoisseurs of Euripidean tragedy? Both Dido and Aeneas are at various points animated by the Furies, those agents of the ‘plan of Zeus’, as it is called in the Iliad. Servius (on 4.609) distinguishes ‘Dirae in caelo, Furiae in terris, Eumenides apud inferos \ but Virgil seems to use all three with no clear demarcation, and in addition in book 3 he is the first to identify the Harpies with the Furies: in Apollonius’ tale of Phineus (book 2) they are associated but distinct. Virgil’s Celaeno describes herself as Furiarum...maxima (3.252). Now when Aeneas is driven on by irrational forces in spite of Hector’s warning he says (2.314ff): arma amens capio nec sat rationis in armis ...... furor iraque mentem praecipitat and resumes all this at 336ff.: talibus Othryadae dictis et numine divum in flammas et in arma feror quo tristis Erinys ....vocat.

Later in book 2 (573) Helen in a fine reminiscence of Aeschylus, Agamemnon 689f. and 749, which Ennius may have foreshadowed in a tragedy (sc.71) is called 'Troiae et patriae communis Erinys The impact of this encounter on Aeneas is to fill him with the mad impulse to kill her: furiata mente ferebar (595). We are commonly told that Aeneas has to overcome the old ‘heroic impulse’ which led him to attempt vain resistance when the Gods had already left their sacred abodes in . And yet the presence of Furies and furor prompts another explanation, more akin to tragedy: the Fury Celaeno prophesies balefully (3.247ff.), calling the Trojans by the ominous patronymic Laomedontiadae. Dido later alludes to the same accursed connection (4.54If.): nescis heu perdita necdum Laomedonteae sentis periuria gentis?

Now already in Iliad 20 (302ff.) Aeneas is destined to save the house of Dardanus from extinction, Priam’s line, that of Laomedon, having fallen out of favour with Zeus. In that astounding apocalypse which Venus gives to Aeneas after the Helen-episode she dispels his

38 inclination to submit to furor with this revelation (2.601 ff.): non tibi Tyndaridis facies invisa Lacaenae culpatusve Paris, divum inclementia, divum, has evertit opes stemitque a culmine Troiam. Venus displays to her son the gods in the very act of destroying Troy. Neptune is destroy­ ing the very walls he built for Laomendon, but, most horrifying of all (617ff.): ipse pater Danais animos virisque secundas sufficit, ipse deos in Dardana suscitat arma. Aeneas is to flee; Venus will be ever by him. But he is left all alone in the thick darkness, and in a positively Gothic moment (622f.) apparent dirae facies inimicaque Troiae numina magna deum. After the sweet sorrow brought by the simile of the collapsing rowan tree, Anchises, who can be as stubborn as his son, refuses to leave Troy, but salvation comes in a very Roman form, the beautiful omen of the halo round little Ascanius’s temples, a more elaborate version of the tale told in i of Servius Tullius. Across these sixty or so lines a great chasm is bridged, from the end of Troy to the beginning of Rome. Father Anchises accepts the omen and gives Juppiter the full glory of his title, not the muted, stunned ‘ipse pater' of Venus’s apocalypse, but (689ff.): Iuppiter omnipotens, precibus si flecteris ullis, aspice nos, hoc tan turn, et si pietate meremur, da deinde augurium, pater, atque haec omina firma.

The Victorians might have subtitled the Aeneid ‘Pietatis Honos', ‘Piety rewarded’, yet this pietas is by no means easily won. Aeneas’s own very personal tragedy comes at the end of book 2, just as the book as a whole is the tragedy of Troy. The Gods have apparently taken away the Trojans’ corporate wits so as to blind them to the Horse’s purpose and make them deaf to its contents (242ff.): quater ipso in limine portae substitit atque utero sonitum quater arma dedere. instamus tamen immemores caecique furore.

For the Horse to stall once on the threshold should have been enough for a scrupulous not to say superstitious people, but four times! In the same way, even after the fruitful omen of the halo, Aeneas has to suffer, and apparently through his own hamartia: he arranges that he with Anchises on his shoulders and little Ascanius clutching his hand should rendezvous with Creusa, but longe servet vestigia coniunx (711), presumably to avoid attracting attention to themselves as a crowd. But where are they to meet? est urbe egressis tumulus templumque vetustum desertae Cereris, iuxtaque antiqua cupressus (713f.)

39 Once more I feel Augustus, Maecenas and other original auditors must have gasped in horror. Shakespeare’s ‘Come away, come away, Death, and in sad Cypress let me be laid’ has respectable classical precedents in Virgil 20 ancj Horace to look no further.

Why did Aeneas not notice the omen — or symbol — of the cypress as the tree of death? (For that it is a symbol is shown first by its omission when the place of rendezvous is described again (at 74Iff.)

nec prius amissam respexi animumve reflexi quam tumulum antiquae Cereris sedemque sacratam venimus and second by the fulfilment of what it symbolizes, namely the death of Creusa.) The answer to the question ‘Why does Aeneas not notice the omen is given at 73 5ff.: hie mihi nescioquod trepido male numen amicum confusam eripuit mentem Some unfriendly power stole away his wits, confused as they were, so that he panicked. After that he never saw Creusa alive again. Eventually Creusa’s gentle ghost explains what this male numen amicum really was as she calms Aeneas’s mad grief and his wild attempts to challenge destiny (777ff.): non haec sine numine divum eveniunt, nec te hinc comitem asportare Creusam fas aut ille sinit superi regnator Olympi. Aeneas had seen nothing crueller in shattered Ilium than this loss of his, yet he accepts his destiny from Creusa’s ghost and does not desire what is not fas. Sic demum: after all this he goes back to his little band of refugees which has grown in the meantime.

In a lost play of Euripides (fr.1022) the Erinys declares that her other names are Tuche, Nemesis, Moira and Ananke. In this consideration of aspects of drama in the treatment of Dido and Aeneas we have reached the point where Fate, Punishment and Justice merge, and that to my mind is the essence of ancient tragedy.

University of Liverpool NOTES

1. Suggestions to a Study of the Aeneid, 1875, 34.

2. R. Vergill Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus, ed. A.S. Pease, 1935, particularly 8ff.

3. JRS xlix, 1959, 16ff.

4. Hermes Einzelschriften, Heft 24, 1972. 5. Penguin, 1973, 94.

6. Proc. Virg. Soc. 12, 1972-73, lOff.

40 legislator, and works supervisor: iura dabat legesque viris operumque laborem partibus aequabat iustis aut sorte trahebat (i.507f.). Aeneas is captivated by Punic luxury (i.637ff., 699ff., iv.193, 215ff., 261ff.), and after a winter of idleness — non coeptae adsurgunt turres (iv.86) - actually participates in the building of Carthage (iv.260, 265f.), forgetful of his own regnum and that due to Ascanius (iv.194, 275, 355, 432), with its glorious future (iv.299ff.). His actions threaten Rome’s destinies and help Rome’s enemies. How­ ever much we (and Aeneas) admire Dido’s activity as foundress — and we are clearly expected to do so (cf. iv.347f., 591, and particularly 655ff.) — we must react differently to its historical outcome. History is prefigured by Dido’s threat to pursue Aeneas atris ignibus (iv.384) as Juno symbolically does in Bks. v, vii and ix (v.604ff., 641, vii.445ff., etc., ix.lff., 69ff.), and by her curse bringing down upon Aeneas suffering and delay in the fulfilment of his destiny, again exactly in Juno’s manner (i. 12ff., etc., iv.612ff.); history is brought vividly before the reader when her curse reaches its climax, invoking the horrors of war awaiting Rome at the hands of the city which Dido founded and built. Our view of Dido should therefore, as we read, be open to continuous adjustment and correction. There remain two further passages towards which the possible reaction of a Roman reader must be evaluated with care: first Dido’s exercise of magic: this does occupy a lot of space — 478-519 — more, really, than the magic’s importance for the p lot requires (Pichon, RPh. 1909, 247ff.) and enough to have suggested an element of poetic self- indulgence, following the lavish descriptions of Apollonius and Theocritus. The only actual function of Dido’s magic — regardless of its pretended intention to bind Aeneas to Dido or to loose Dido from him — is to blind Anna to her sister’s intended suicide while securing the provision of a pyre. Eitrem’s detailed analysis of Dido’s magic (summarised by Austin p. 149) shows convincingly that the ritual as described could not have worked within the terms of ancient magic, and his inference that it was not meant to work is legitimate. The importance of Dido’s resort to magic for our reaction to her cannot rest simply upon (492f.) testor, cara, deos, et te, germana, tuumque dulce caput magicas invitam accingier artis. Granted that she is innocent of serious belief in magic — both Anna and the old nurse Barce are clearly more committed than she is — the fact remains that her appeals to orthodox divinities (56ff.) for their blessing on her liaison have failed, and that despite her protestation of non-involvement, she is prepared to make use of these murky rituals for her convenience. Her use of magic hardly “estranges” the reader (cf. Pease p.407), but though the description may rouse “pity and terror” (Austin p. 150) at Dido’s plight, may it not also be meant to lower her in our esteem? Servius sensibly comments quia multa sacra Romani susciperent semper magica damnarunt: ideo excusat — referring to 493, and it is unnecessary to reinforce his statement by reference to (for instance) Horace and Roman Law. Medea keeps a fine store of magic charms in a box in her bedroom (A.R.iii.812, 844) whereas Dido is informed secretly by a priestess from the westernmost ends of the earth: the action in her case must be strange, abnormal and therefore discreditable. Secondly, the pictures in the temple in Bk. i: Aeneas sees in them sympathy for his plight and an earnest for the future: hoc primum in luco nova res oblata timorem leniit, hie primum Aeneas sperare salutem ausus et afflictis melius confidere rebus (450ff.; cf. 463). But the reader will question whether any true salus can come from Carthage, whether the

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