As Aeneas inspects the murals more closely, Dido and her attendants enter the temple. A woman of great beauty and majesty, she seats herself on her throne and holds court.
Dido welcomes Aeneas and prepares a banquet in his honor. Aeneas sends for Ascanius, whom Venus, fearing that Juno will again cause trouble, replaces with her own son, Cupid, the god of love, in disguise. She knows that Cupid will fill Dido with passion for Aeneas, thus ensuring the hero's safety. That night at the banquet, Dido unsuspectingly embraces Cupid, thinking that he is Ascanius, and she is filled with love for Aeneas.
Overcome by curiosity and admiration, she invites the Trojan hero to describe his wanderings and misfortunes to her and her guests. Postponing until Book II the account of Troy's invasion by the Greeks, which is the chronological starting point of his poem, Virgil begins the Aeneid at what may well be its most crucial and dramatic moment: at the very instant when the Trojans, after many years of wandering, are swept away from their goal of finding a homeland and are stranded on foreign shores that Virgil's readers would have recognized as enemy territory.
The elation that the Trojans all felt as they sailed from Sicily is changed to horror and despair, and although by this time Aeneas has been given many prophecies of his eventual success, he must struggle to summon up a brave front for the benefit of his disconsolate companions.
This opening book offers an excellent example of the literary device known as in medias res , a Latin expression meaning "in the middle of things. Virgil's beginning Aeneas's story this way allows the events surrounding the fall of Troy and the adventures that ensue to be narrated afterwards by Aeneas himself. Carthage's Queen Dido, already in love with the Trojan warrior, will find many more good reasons to admire him as he unintentionally presents himself to her as a model of heroism.
Throughout the Aeneid , the actions of human beings are accompanied by the actions of gods and goddesses, who constantly intervene in human affairs as partisans or enemies, and who are remarkably human in their own passions. Juno, for example, possesses a seemingly inexhaustible supply of grudges against the Trojans. Fittingly, her voice is heard first in the poem, and its tone is outrage: She will be the major impediment to Aeneas's unfortunate struggles to found a homeland.
Also dramatically significant is that her appearance as the epic's chief divine antagonist should be followed soon afterward by the entrance of Venus, who, as the hero's indulgent and protective mother, opposes Juno with a force that will ultimately prevail. In Book I, Virgil seems to pay more attention to divine actions than to human concerns.
In addition to our learning about Juno's all-consuming jealousy of Aeneas's fated glory, we see how petty and territorial her fellow gods are.
For example, Aeolus is easily bribed to wreak havoc against Aeneas's fleet by Juno's promising him an exquisite nymph for a wife. Juno has obviously favored him in the past: He concedes that he owes her for everything she has done for him. However, like a pair of bickering children, the territorial sea god Neptune chastises his sister Juno and calms his seas.
Although we applaud Venus's protection of her son, she is as manipulative of humans as Juno is. However, because Aeneas is the epic's hero, we are more likely to forgive Venus's indiscretionary power. For example, she causes Dido to fall in love with Aeneas out of fear that the queen otherwise might harm either her son or grandson, or both.
However, Venus is not personally against Dido; rather, she is for Aeneas. She does not harm Dido as Juno would the Trojan prince. Detached from the Trojans's distress and the goddesses's passions, Jupiter assures Venus that all is going to be well for her son.
He delivers the first major prophecy in the Aeneid , a forecast of Rome's national glory. Dido sees the fleet leaving and falls into her final despair. She can no longer bear to live. Running out to the courtyard, she climbs upon the pyre and unsheathes a sword Aeneas has left behind. She throws herself upon the blade and with her last words curses her absent lover.
As Anna and the servants run up to the dying queen, Juno takes pity on Dido and ends her suffering and her life. Jekyll and Mr. SparkTeach Teacher's Handbook. Character List Aeneas Dido Turnus. Themes Motifs Symbols. Summary Book IV. Page 1 Page 2. The building of Carthage comes to a complete stop. Even worse, the city's defense against enemy invasion — a concern that Anna uses to urge her sister to pursue Aeneas — is not maintained.
In one of the poem's few instances of overtly moral proselytizing, Virgil warns that passion — love out of control — causes disorder, both physically and emotionally, and even affects one impiously: "What good are shrines and vows to maddened lovers? Her faithlessness in the gods and destiny demonstrates just how psychologically mad she has become.
Virgil's portrayal of Dido in Book IV is one of the great literary character studies in all of literature. Dido finally knows, as do we, that she is doomed to fail in her conquest of Aeneas, yet we applaud her resourcefulness in facing down her destiny. Her begging at the beginning of Book IV for the earth to swallow her before she falls deeper into passion's indomitable grip is balanced by a similar self-recognition of her plight toward the book's end, when she asks of herself, "What am I saying?
Where am I? In some ways, Dido, like Turnus, her male counterpart in the second half of the Aeneid , is even more heroic than Aeneas. After all, Aeneas eventually learns that fate is on his side no matter how difficult his journey may be. Dido and Turnus, however, are heroic without this assurance, most of all at the moment of their deaths.
Stylistically, Virgil reinforces Dido's inability to control her passion by imagining her as a fire that grows and cannot be quenched. Fittingly, she dies on a pyre, used for burning corpses in funeral rites. However, her inner flame has been extinguished by her own hand; there is no reason to light the pyre now. The Carthaginian queen is the plaything, the pawn, of both Juno and Venus.
She has no freedom except in her choice to kill herself, an act of courage that proves she is a tragic — as well as a romantic — heroine. Indeed, Dido loses, but the cruel goddesses who use her lose also. In trying against their better judgment to alter the will of fate, they only serve it: The passion that Venus inspires and Juno sanctions is, as fate decrees, frustrated, causing Dido to put a curse on the Trojans, which, in turn, will lead to the Punic Wars.
Although Juno and Venus's intention is to change the fated outcomes of human lives, their manipulative actions are the very instruments of fate that will ensure Rome's triumph and Carthage's defeat.
Juno knows that Rome's eventual victory over its rival city has been decreed, but the goddess's attempts to block this outcome ironically make it possible. Likewise, the Romans, although ultimately victorious, will endure hardships — the Punic Wars — that Venus, of whom they are the favored people, does not foresee when she attempts to protect her son by having Dido fall in love with him.
Fate moves toward its end as inexorably as water flows down to the sea; it may be forced to change its course a little, but it triumphs over every attempt to prevent its fulfillment.
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