Dido’s Long Dying

Michael C. J. Putnam Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

. . . sic fata gradus evaserat altos, semianimemque sinu germanam amplexa fovebat cum gemitu atque atros siccabat veste cruores. illa gravis oculos conata attollere rursus de½cit; in½xum stridit sub pectore vulnus. ter sese attollens cubitoque adnixa levavit, ter revoluta toro est oculisque errantibus alto quaesivit caelo lucem ingemuitque reperta. Tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata dolorem dif½cilisque obitus Irim demisit Olympo quae luctantem animam nexosque resolveret artus. MICHAEL C J PUTNAM . . , a Fellow nam quia nec fato merita nec morte peribat, of the American Academy since 1996, is the W. Duncan MacMillan II sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore, Professor of Classics and Professor nondum illi flavum Proserpina vertice crinem of Comparative Literature, Emeri- abstulerat Stygioque caput damnaverat Orco. tus, at Brown University. His books include The Humanness of Heroes: ergo Iris croceis per caelum roscida pennis Studies in the Conclusion of ’s mille trahens varios adverso sole colores “” (2011) and A Companion devolat et supra caput astitit. ‘hunc ego Diti to Virgil’s “Aeneid” and its Tradition sacrum iussa fero teque isto corpore solvo’: (edited with Joseph Farrell, 2010). He has recently translated Jacopo sic ait et dextra crinem secat, omnis et una Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry (2009) dilapsus calor atque in ventos vita recessit. and The Complete Poems of Tibullus (with Rodney G. Dennis, 2012). –Virgil, Aeneid, book 4: lines 685–705

© 2014 by Michael C. J. Putnam doi:10.1162/DAED_a_00258

99 ’s This said, she [Anna] mounts the pile with ancient Greece and the evolution of ver- Long Dying eager haste, nacular exemplars of the genre in late- And in her arms the gasping Queen medieval and Renaissance Italy and be- embraced; yond. From there we move, in English, Her temples chafed, and her own from the work of Milton, Wordsworth, garments tore Tennyson, and Hardy, among others, to To stanch the streaming blood and Derek Walcott’s splendid Omeros, which, cleanse the gore. for twenty-½rst-century readers, brings to Thrice oped her heavy eyes and saw the light, completion a millennial cycle of accom- But having found it, sickened at the sight, plishments in the form. And closed her lids at last in endless night. What Virgil adds to Homer could be briefly put as an expanded sense of his- Then , grieving that she should sustain Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 torical development, of ethnic and political A death so lingering and so full of pain, diversity, and of the ethics expected to be Sent Iris down to free her from the strife emulated by the powerful ½gures destined Of labouring nature and dissolve her life. to be the major protagonists in ’s For since she died, not doomed by march to empire. Our poet extends the Heaven’s decree, Homeric prototypes so that we have a Of her own crime, but human casualty novel mixture of the Iliad, with its battling And rage of love, that plunged her in despair, before the walls of Troy, and the Odyssey, The sisters had not cut the topmost hair an adventure-½lled journey of return to Which Proserpine and they can only know, island home and family. As an amalgam- Nor made her sacred to the shades below. ation, the Aeneid in fact draws throughout Downward the various goddess took its full course on both earlier epics to her flight, fashion its own particular version of a And drew a thousand colours from the light; voyage of discovery, from Troy in ruins to Then stood above the dying lover’s head, the shores of Italy, to the site of Rome, and And said, “I thus devote thee to the dead: to the golden age of Augustus–in the far This offering to the infernal gods I bear.” distance for the poem’s chief protagonist, Thus while she spoke she cut the fatal hair, , but contemporary for Virgil and The struggling soul was loosed, and life his readers. dissolved in air. As the hero pursues his fated path, we follow a route dotted by extraordinary –English translation of Virgil, occurrences, such as his dalliance with by John Dryden (1697) Dido, or his venture into the Underworld, with the Cumaean Sibyl as guide, to visit his father and learn something of what lies ahead for himself and for his progeny, with their unprecedented sweep of achieve- ments projected through time. Homer has In handbooks devoted to the history of little that suggests this notion of a thou- Western literature, Virgil’s Aeneid is usually sand year development, of a fated progress bracketed between Homer’s two master- that ends with one of the West’s grandest pieces, the Iliad and the Odyssey, and cultural statements. Dante’s Divina Comedia as a milestone in Nor does Homer more than suggest the the development of the epic. It is the patterns of behavior open to a hero who Latin bridge between the literature of bears the spiritual burden of Rome’s fu -

100 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences ture greatness while he literally carries his two, Caesar and Pompey, father-in-law and Michael father on his shoulders and leads his son son-in-law, who challenge each other in C. J. Putnam by the hand out of the smoldering remains the penultimate phase of the lengthy civil of Troy. A major aspect of the ethics that war that preceded the Augustan peace. should dictate how to use the omnipotence The prayer, addressed speci½cally to Cae- that follows in the aftermath of victorious sar whom the myth of the Julian gens conquest is put to Aeneas by his father, claimed as ’s linear descendant, Anchises, at the end of their meeting in asks him to practice moderation in pur- the land of the dead. Apostrophizing him suit of war, which is to say, in practical as Romane, and therefore as prototype terms, to spare by ridding himself of the and paragon of his future race, he outlines weapons that the victor might be tempted by précis the nub of what Rome’s greatest to misuse. Restraint seems particularly im - Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 talent will accomplish. It will be not for perative when brother is ½ghting brother achievements in bronze or stone sculp- and when the fatherland (patria), the ture, not for skill at oratory or in astronomy abstract body politic that protects all, is the that his people will boast in due course. ultimate victim. In actuality, this period Roman artistry lies elsewhere: of ½ghting only ended when ½rst Pompey and then Caesar were murdered. tu regere imperio populos, Romane, Instances of moderation dot the epic’s memento text. In book 2, prevents angry (hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere Aeneas from killing Helen in revenge for morem, the suffering she has caused, and in book 9, parcere subiectis et debellare superbos. Apollo orders Aeneas’s son, / (Aeneid, book 6: lines 851–853) Iulus, to forbear from further slaughter lest Remember, Roman, to rule peoples with he bring retaliation in turn upon himself. might (these will be your arts), to impose But, in this context, the example that most [upon them] a custom for peace, to spare the troubles the reader, with purpose on Vir- humbled and war down the proud.1 gil’s part, is the very conclusion of the poem, where Aeneas, “set aflame by furies In other words, Roman aesthetic or intel- and terrifying in his anger,” kills his sup- lectual accomplishment will not lie in tan - pliant opponent, , who is on his gible works of art, or even in rhetoric’s knees, hand outstretched, craving mercy. persuasive abilities or in the authority None is forthcoming.2 that derives from cataloguing the heavens. It will come from something both less With this background in mind, I would and more tangible: from a dynamic form like to turn to the speci½c event in the of political astuteness dedicated especially Aeneid that has had the deepest effect on to a morality of restraint in dealing with later artists, namely the death of Dido, to those vulnerable to a conqueror’s force. whom Virgil devotes the fourth book of In the verses before addressing these ab - his poem. Other individual scenes in the stract dicta to his son, Anchises calls our epic have captured the imaginations of attention to a concrete instance where future generations–I think, for instance, sparing the subjugated should be exem- of Aeneas and the Sibyl, or of Turnus’s plary in future Roman behavior. In the pa- death–but none has moved readers as rade of Roman greats whose ghosts know- deeply and consistently as the sequence ing father catalogues for ignorant son, the of occurrences associated with the love patriarch in conclusion apostrophizes between Trojan prince and Carthaginian

143 (1) Winter 2014 101 Dido’s queen, events that culminate in her sui- feeling. It is in projecting her road to death Long Dying cide. The story of Dido has exerted a pro- that Virgil’s virtuosity is most apparent. found influence on Western literature, Here, his text has had its profoundest in - from Virgil’s younger contemporary Ovid, fluence on later artists, and it is where I in the seventh of his Heroides, to the re - felt its power most when I ½rst read the cent poetry of Louise Glück. Its potency poem’s twelve books in Latin as an un- is felt in music, in masterpieces such as dergraduate in college. I would like to de - Henry Purcell’s and Hector vote the remainder of this essay to watch- Berlioz’s . And various scenes ing closely a few of the ways by which the from book 4 have elicited powerful depic- text works its magic upon us. I am inter- tions from painters as diverse as Claude ested in particular in the means by which Lorrain, Tiepolo, Reynolds, and Turner. the poet extends the time-span of Dido’s Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 The paradox remains that the tragedy as suffering so as gradually to draw the reader it evolves is built on Aeneas’s forced re - into close sympathy with her circum- nunciation of private passion in order to stances. There is no better way to trace a embrace the impersonal destiny that fate master poet’s maneuvers than by looking has cast his way. The ending of the poem intently at his words and their deployment. suggests that the titular hero could act Here, as regularly, only a close examina- quite differently from how he behaves to- tion of the original language will do jus- ward Dido. From one angle of interpreta- tice to the artist’s craft and inventiveness. tion, the poem’s conclusion is discomfort- ing because Aeneas gives in to personal Let us begin as we ½nd Dido and Aeneas emotion when he should least do so, which sharing a banquet she has prepared for her is to say, at a crucial turn of events where royal guest: he should function as a model of forbear- ance and where Virgil’s text itself, at its nec non et vario noctem sermone trahebat ½nale and climax, should most serve a di- infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem, . . . dactic purpose, for us as well as for its ini- (1:748–749) tial readers. We leave the poem having just Ill-fated Dido also was stretching out the witnessed, for a ½nal time, how the spe - night with varied conversation and drinking ci½cs of human emotionality are ever at in love at length . . . odds with more general, idealizing aspi- rations. We hope for a cathartic display of As we turn from literal drinking to meta- mercy through an act of pardon, a scenario phoric, we move from wine to the im - similar to the conclusion of Mozart’s Le plicit poison her love for Aeneas por- Nozze di Figaro. Virgil fails to gratify our tends. The double use of the imperfect wishes, leaving us for contemplation only tense not only implies temporal continuity, a manifestation of rage leading to a violent the echo of trahebat in bibebat also connects killing. His lesson reinforces a constant the words themselves with love’s length- in the chronicle of human history, that ening over time. And indeed, as the queen revenge regularly breeds further revenge. listens to the tale of her guest’s adventures Though in book 4 Aeneas suppresses his during and after the fall of Troy, a recita- feelings in favor of an impersonal calling, tion that takes up the epic’s second and Dido, by contrast, turns her own deep sen- third books, her love only deepens. sibility ½rst verbally against her abscond- As we reach book 4 and return to the ing lover, then physically against herself narrative proper, Virgil changes the meta - as she resorts to suicide, so as to end all phor from poison to wound and flame,

102 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences while still reminding us of time’s extent nessing the commencement of the death Michael as a marked feature of his presentation: that will ultimately come about from their C. J. Putnam imminence. At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura As the plot progresses, Virgil uses ½g- vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni. uration regularly to draw the reader into (4:1–2) Dido’s emotional world. Let me offer one But the queen, for a long time now wounded salient example. At line 401, the narrator, with grievous suffering, nourishes the in an unusual gesture within what is ordi- wound with her veins and is the prey of narily third-person delivery, addresses us hidden ½re. in the second person. We are asked in our mind’s eye, as individual students of Vir- But it is only at lines 169 to 172, with an gil’s text, to imagine beholding the Trojans Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 authorial intervention in the narrative, as they flee Carthage: that we begin to realize to the full Virgil’s intent of ½guratively dilating the duration migrantis cernas totaque ex urbe ruentis: . . . of the queen’s agony: you might observe them moving away and ille dies primus leti primusque malorum hurrying from the whole city. causa fuit; neque enim specie famave And, with only the intervention of a simile, movetur that “you” shortly becomes Dido herself: nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem: coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus, culpam. (4:169–172) quosve dabas gemitus, cum litora fervere late prospiceres arce ex summa, totumque That was the ½rst day of death and the ½rst videres to be the source of evil; for Dido is not misceri ante oculos tantis clamoribus moved by appearance or repute nor does aequor! (4:408–411) she now ponder a hidden love. She calls it marriage and with this label veils her blame. What feelings were yours then, Dido, ob- serving such things, or what groans did you The demonstrative hoc brings home the keep uttering when you looked out from the fact that the narrator is commenting on top of the citadel at the beach swarming far the action, presenting its meaning directly and wide, and saw before your eyes the to us, but it is especially the initial phrase, whole sea swirling with such great shouts! ille dies primus leti, that captures our atten- tion as we follow out Dido’s emotional his- The apostrophe to Dido makes her present tory to its conclusion. One of our ½nest before our eyes. By the magic of ½guration Virgilian scholars, Roland Austin, mini- we are at Carthage, watching her as she mizes the effect of primus here by making watches the Trojans departing. We hear it adverbial (he translates: “That day in the the noise (“such great shouts”) that she beginning was the cause of death, that apprehends. But by the focused repeti- day in the beginning was the cause of sor- tion of cernas in cernenti, Virgil would have row”).3 But such a reading tends to di - us for a brief stretch of time actually minish the horror of Virgil’s implication become the grieving lover as she views that Dido’s dying takes place over a stretch Aeneas and his colleagues set sail on their of time. We have been prepared for this way to Rome. It is hard to imagine great by the earlier metaphoric implications of sympathy being elicited more magisteri- poison, wound, and ½re. We are now wit- ally by verbal means.

143 (1) Winter 2014 103 Dido’s But, if we have been witnessing her death A second detail is the striking phrase Long Dying over the length of four books of an epic, dif½cilis obitus. It has been a subject of de- Dido’s actual moment of dying is itself bate by students of Virgil as to why the also powerfully protracted in its exposi- poet chooses to use a plural, “dif½cult tion. Take the word vulnus (wound), for deaths,” instead of the more straightfor- instance. It occurs in the singular earlier ward singular to describe Dido’s passing. in book 4 at lines 2 and 67, as metaphor In his commentary on the phrase, Austin for her love’s destructive aspect. When feels that the plural here may be “‘inten- she actually stabs herself with Aeneas’s sive’, marking the slow agony of Dido’s sword on her funeral pyre, Virgil turns death, the tortured moments one by one,” singular to plural (vulnera [4:683]). Literal but then underestimates the force of his wounds have now been added to a single, insight as “highly subjective.”4 Surely, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 metaphorical hurt, forcing us to contem- however, he is absolutely correct and his plate the arc of this very development as judgment should be expanded. Through one type of suffering leads to, and is piled a single word we endure the ½nal minutes upon, another during the approach of of Dido’s drawn-out passage from life to death. death, hurt by hurt, grief by grief, with Virgil employs a complementary tech- mental pain combined with physical in a nique shortly after as the goddess Juno at concatenation of suffering. last frees her suffering devotee from the body’s trammels: But Dido’s ½nal instants are but part of the larger history of dying. Her death Tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata began for the reader long ago, with the dolorem poisoned draught of love and with dif½cilisque obitus Irim demisit Olympo ille dies , the day when the lovers con- quae luctantem animam nexosque primus leti summate their desire. In the case of Dido, resolveret artus. (4:693–695) death is implicit in love and marks its Then almighty Juno, taking pity on her long beginning. And it is a sign of Virgil’s vir- grief and dif½cult dying sent Iris down from tuosity not only to spread this aspect of Olympus to undo her struggling spirit and her tale out over narrative time, but also entangled limbs. to give it particular concentration at the actual moment of her demise, where the Let me point out two details in this ex - plural obitus implies a multitude of deaths traordinary resolution of life into death. both now and in the past. The ½rst is the echo of longum amorem, Her deaths stay with us throughout the whose poison we have seen Dido drink in rest of the poem.5 When Aeneas meets book 1 when the banquet’s literal wine Dido’s ghost in the Underworld, it is of becomes the venom of destructive, ex - her dolor (6:464) at his departure that his tensive passion. Long love now yields words tell. Or, for another example, Virgil place to longum dolorem, the grief brought opens the poem’s eleventh book by re - about by unreciprocated passion over time peating a line from book 4 that introduces that both complements and then becomes the tragic hunt and storm: the pain of a prolonged demise. We have followed this metamorphosis from book Oceanum interea surgens Aurora reliquit:. . . 1 to the end of book 4, engaging with the (4:129) anguish of the queen during the transmu- tation of metaphoric wound into literal. Meanwhile the rising Dawn had left the Ocean . . .

104 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences This repetition is tantamount to advising lion stricken by hunters, one of whom is Michael the reader that he should sense a connec- called a latro, a robber. I quote the initial C. J. Putnam tion between Dido’s passing and the bur- lines of the comparison: geoning war in Latium. The poet suggests . . . Poenorum qualis in arvis a reason for such a link some seventy saucius ille gravi venantum vulnere pectus lines later, when Aeneas prepares the tum demum movet arma leo, . . . (12:4–6) body of the dead youth for burial: tum geminas vestis auroque ostroque rigentis . . . just as in the ½elds of the Poeni that lion, extulit Aeneas, quas illi laeta laborum wounded in his chest by hunters’ grievous ipsa suis quondam manibus Sidonia Dido wound, then at last advances to battle . . . fecerat et tenui telas discreverat auro. The demonstrative ille points our eye at harum unam iuveni supremum maestus this special animal, and the particularity Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 honorem continues in several other ways.6 The induit arsurasque comas obnubit amictu. lion is placed in the territory of the (11:72–77) Carthaginians (Poeni). The creature’s uniqueness becomes still more distinc- Then Aeneas took out twin clothes, stiff tive by means of the poet’s careful remi- with gold and purple, which Dido of Sidon, niscence of the opening lines of book 4, happy with her efforts, had herself once quoted earlier: made for him with her own hands and had interspersed the texture with gold. In sad- At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura ness with one of these, as a ½nal honor, he vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni. clothes the youth and veils his locks, soon This is no ordinary human lion whose to burn, with the shroud. habitat is Carthage, but one who stands The reader is left to surmise why Dido is as direct surrogate for Dido. The epic’s so prominently recalled to memory be- ½nal book, as we have seen, begins and fore the funeral of Aeneas’s young pro- ends with Turnus, not with the titular hero. tégé. But Virgil implies at least one It also carefully imitates the progress we answer at the very end of the poem. There have traced in book 4 from metaphorical we learn that the hero’s dolor, his grief to literal wound. There, Dido endures and resentment at the death of Pallas, is both the pain of unrequited love and the what ½nally spurs him to kill Turnus, his self-inflicted wound of her suicide. In suppliant antagonist who had earlier book 12, Aeneas engenders the ½gurative killed the youth in hand-to-hand combat. hurt by robbing Turnus of , to Passion is again the spur to action, even whom he considers himself betrothed. against a humbled foe. The chief differ- He also perpetrates the ½nal wounding of ence with the death of Dido is that now Turnus as the epic comes to its dramatic, the hero himself kills, rather than simply unrelieved conclusion. So Dido’s long serving as the indirect cause of suicide. dying continues after her own death in And, ½nally, there is Turnus himself. book 4, carefully extended by the poet’s His name initiates the epic’s ½nal, longest genius. We are reminded literally of it in book, just as the departure of his life to book 6, when Aeneas meets her ghost, the shades brings it to a conclusion. He, “Phoenician Dido with her wound still not Aeneas, claims the poetry’s cycle. At fresh” (Phoenissa recens a vulnere Dido the opening, Virgil brings him before us [6:450]). But, as we have seen, her presence with a startling simile that likens him to a symbolically complements the deaths of

143 (1) Winter 2014 105 Dido’s both Pallas and Turnus, which are in turn to her dying words as conveyed by com- Long Dying strategically intertwined. manding composers like Purcell and So the influence of Dido permeates the Berlioz, the latter a lover of Virgil from action of the epic long after her own pass- his youth. In “When I am laid, am laid, in ing and until the very moment of its con- earth” and in “Ah, je vais mourir,” music’s clusion. It is this influence that has extent in briefer, more trenchant com- reached out to all sensitive readers of the pass, movingly echoes the sorrow that poem and has made its mark on literature Virgil, over a stretch of epic narrative, has and the ½ne arts ever since. There is no so brilliantly conveyed to us in perhaps better way to experience her hurt over the most affecting portrayal of his ½nal the imagination’s time than by listening masterpiece. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/daed/article-pdf/143/1/99/1830325/daed_a_00258.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

endnotes 1 This and all subsequent Aeneid translations, unless otherwise noted, by the author. 2 As he prepares to kill Turnus, Aeneas is furiis accensus et ira / terribilis (“set aflame by furies and terrifying in his anger” [Aeneid, book 12: lines 946–947]). The language deliberately recalls two moments in book 4. In the ½rst, Dido describes herself before her suicide: heu furiis incensa feror (“Alas, I am borne along, set a½re by furies” [4:376]). On the second occasion, as we have seen, the narrator remarks that, as she prepared for the moment of self-slaughter, she was subito . . . accensa furore (literally: “set aflame by sudden fury” [4:697]). In the end, the poet has Aeneas emulate Dido rather than Anchises by choosing passion over self-control, immediate human feeling over the restraint asked of Rome to come. 3 R. G. Austin, ed., P. Vergili Maronis: Aeneidos: Liber Quartus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 69 (on Aeneid, 4:169f). Dido’s delay before leaving her room to share in the day’s hunt is one of several great moments of hesitation that dot the epic (cunctantem [4:133]). We think also of the golden bough’s reluctance to be plucked by Aeneas (6:211) and of the hero’s own moment of pause before killing Turnus (12:940). Dido’s delay in its own way further stretches out the duration of her dying. 4 Ibid., 199 (on Aeneid, 4:694). 5 Damien Nelis rightly pointed out to me that the “sad foreboding” (triste augurium [5:7]), which the departing Trojans sense as they look back at the flames emanating from Carthage, suggests that we will often return to thoughts of Dido and her death as the epic progresses. 6 The term deictic is appropriately applied to ille by T. E. Page in his comment on the word. See T. E. Page, ed., The Aeneid of Virgil: Books VII–XII (London: Macmillan, 1929), 413 (on Aeneid, 12:5).

106 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences