Sophomore Paper on the Aeneid

The Word Half-spoken, the Vow Half-kept,

the City Half-built, and the Life Half-lived:

An Explication of the Interplay Between

Conscience and Sovereignty in Virgil’s Account of Dido

From Virgil’s Aeneid

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Philip Thomas Mohr

St. John’s College, Annapolis

Sophomore Paper Spring 2008

Concerning Dido’s story, if Virgil did not want to draw attention to the intricacies of politics and the effects of shame, he could have written an obscure tale of a tragic romance in only a few lines. Woman falls in love. Woman loses love. Woman kills herself in despair. A concise, sad story. Dido, however, is not portrayed as some vague person but as a great and glorious queen, a goddess among men; the romance she has with Aeneas is the work of the gods in the greatest political scheme in history; and her personal tragedy is a tragedy for an entire nation. Given the greatness and intimacy of this disastrous love story, it is clear that Virgil means to reveal something about her love—not about love in general, nor about any person in general, but the forbidden love of an independent queen.

Dido’s story, the progression from glory and life to shame and death, is for Virgil a statement of the interplay between personal autonomy and political efficacy, with respect to shame and the preservation of conscience. After establishing this, asking how these relate is a question worth pursuing, and leads to a larger question about their relation in the scope of the whole epic—whether Virgil is trying to teach Aeneas and the future Romans a lesson concerning conscience and politics.

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Turning to the middle of her story, where Dido is falling into the torturous madness of love, Virgil gives us a once composed and majestically cold queen who has become ignited with passion. He paints her thus:

All the while the flame devours her tender heartstrings, and deep in her breast lives the silent wound. Unhappy Dido burns, and through the city wanders in frenzy—even as a hind, smitten by an arrow, which, all unwary, amid the Cretan woods, a shepherd hunting with darts has pierced from afar, leaving in her the winged steel, unknowing; she in flight ranges the Dictaean woods and glades, but fast to her side clings the deadly shaft. Now through the city’s midst she leads Aeneas with her, and displays her Sidonian wealth and the city built; she begins to speak and stops with the word half-spoken. (4.66–76)¹

Ending the simile with this odd phrase, “the word half-spoken,” is abrupt and ominous, completely unforeseen. Yet it fully describes the effect of Amor on her devastated life.

The word half-spoken is surely a prefiguration of her early demise, for “she perished neither in the course of fate nor by a death she had earned, but wretchedly before her day” (6.696f.). Stopping short mid-sentence parallels well her suicide in the prime of life. (The latter part of this paper will briefly address this.)

The phrase is also very closely connected with Dido’s relationship, as a sovereign, to the city itself. Virgil reveals soon after:

No longer rise the towers begun, no longer do the youth exercise in arms, or toil at havens or bulwarks for safety in war; the works are broken off and idle—great menacing walls and cranes that touch the sky. (4.86–89)

Dido stops her work. The city had been, in only a few short years, steadily growing in both size and splendor. The existence of the cranes and other large structures speaks to its industry. That the youth were once training for war speaks to its formidable standing as a political entity in Africa. Suddenly, however, everything is “broken off and idle” when Dido is conquered by her love. She stops speaking mid-sentence, and likewise the city halts mid-stride when running its course toward fame.

The cessation of work in Carthage is a significant turn for Dido’s role as queen. It is in exact accord with Venus’s plot “to outwit the queen with guile and encircle her with love’s flame, that so no power may change her,” and that so “she may be held fast in strong love for Aeneas” (1.673–75). Venus seeks to immobilize her, making her activity less like that of a ruler and more like that of a subject, a man’s trophy. This bondage to passion greatly worries Juno (4.90f.). The goddess therefore, in desperation, agrees to have Dido serve Aeneas and yield her Tyrian people to Venus’s power (4.103f.). Through these designs of the gods, Virgil has given a sure correlation between Dido’s submission to this passion and her inefficacy as a sovereign. She had been a fully capable ruler, but her love for Aeneas brings about a paralysis of power. Wanting to examine this more closely, it is appropriate to turn now to Dido’s state prior to Amor’s assault and prior to the word half-spoken.

When she first appears, Virgil gives an elaborate simile:

. . . The queen, Dido, moved towards the temple, of surpassing beauty, with a vast company of youths thronging round her. Even as on Eurotas’ banks or along the heights of Cynthus Diana guides her dancing bands, in whose train a thousand Oreads troop to right and left; she bears a quiver on her shoulder, and as she treads overtops all the goddesses; joys thrill Latona’s silent breast—such was Dido, so moved she joyously through their midst, pressing on the work of her rising kingdom. 1.496–504

Diana is a female bearing arms, surrounded by devoted worshipers, and chaste despite all; so also is Dido (albeit she had once been married, yet her choice to remain a widow resembles this same kind of chastity). Also like Diana, she has a mysterious beauty compounded with a seemingly untouchable, undefiled, incorruptible character. This combines well with the earlier reference to the Amazon Penthesilea, “a maid clashing with men,” at whose image Aeneas had been gazing when he first sees Dido (1.490–93). Indeed Dido is a woman with outstanding success in a world dominated by men. She is her own master and the master of her own realm. In all these images and in the narration following, Virgil presents her as industrious, “pressing on the work of her rising kingdom”; joyous; pious, for she holds her court in Juno’s temple; glorious, “high enthroned”; judicious, giving laws to her people; and popular, “with a vast company of youths thronging round her” (1.497, 503–8). The initial splendor of her character gives even more depth to the word half-spoken and to her eventual submission to Aeneas. The Dido that Virgil portrays here is subject to no one and needs no help in her work.

It is important to note a key emphasis in Dido’s likeness to Diana: a kind of holiness particular to the female. The power of her character is seemingly untouchable for men, despite all their power. Even after Amor’s assault, she maintains this chastity and shows strong resistance:

Were the purpose not planted in my mind, fixed and immovable, to ally myself with none in bond of wedlock, since my first love, turning traitor, cheated me by death; were I not tired of the bridal bed and torch, to this one fault, perhaps, I might have yielded! . . . But rather, I would pray, may earth yawn for me to its depths, or may the Almighty Father hurl me with his bolt to the shades—the pale shades and abysmal night in Erebus—before, Shame [Pudor], I violate you or break your laws! He who first linked me to himself has taken away my heart; may he keep it with him, and guard it in the grave! 4.15–29

She recommits herself to the resolution that she made when she fled from her brother Pygmalion, and she affirms that Pudor—that is, her conscience or sense of shame—is worthier to be obeyed than Amor or any passion. These resolutions are evidenced in her previous refusals to marry the African kings around her (4.35–38, 534–536). Again, in different words, there is suggested a correlation between Dido’s personal resolve against this kind of passion and her political power. Her conscience is indeed preserving more than her personal integrity, for Dido is necessarily both chaste and politically unyoked, being only allied to her dead husband. Therefore, her personal resolution to have this Diana-like holiness is inextricably connected to her politics; her widowhood intimately tied to her authority and independence as a sovereign.

Though at first Virgil shows us a woman unwilling to compromise herself, yet she does fall. In the doe simile mentioned above, the image of the huntress Diana degenerates into a hunted beast, and she who once led Tyrian youths through the city, coming and going with regal purpose, becomes the one who wanders like some wounded and frenzied prey (4.68f). In the doe simile and elsewhere, Virgil likens her love to an insidious, silent wound (4.1f.), and Amor’s power to poison (1.688). This love is corrosive and cancerous, deteriorating everything it overgrows. Now, looking at what is worn down in Dido to give Amor a foothold will show the full implication of the queen’s fall.

First, Amor “little by little begins to efface Sychaeus,” (1.720f.). To stir her passions toward Aeneas, he must remove the stronghold of Sychaeus in her memory. She will not pursue Aeneas while she considers herself bound so to her dead husband (4.15–19), while her heart is with him in the underworld (4.28f.). For Dido, the vow to the ashes of her former lord is entwined together with that respect for Pudor, which maintains the integrity of her conscience (4.15–27). Therefore if the gods mean to efface Sychaeus, they needs must in the same effort be attacking her personal sense of shame. Yet not by sensual stimulation can they overcome her, but only by an argument from her sister Anna:

O you who are dearer to your sister than the light, are you, lonely and sad, going to pine away all your youth long, and know not sweet children or love’s rewards? Do you think that dust or buried shades give heed to that? 4.31–34

Here, after accusing her of wasting herself in grief and loneliness as a widow, Anna criticizes her devotion to Sychaeus, saying that buried shades can neither protect, nor provide children for, nor give pleasure to a living woman. Both Amor and Anna, in desiring to see Dido linked with Aeneas, must abolish the remnants of Sychaeus in Dido’s mind. So “with these words she fanned into flame the queen’s love-enkindled heart, put hope in her wavering mind, and loosed the bonds of shame [pudorem]” (4.54f.). At the end of Anna’s argument, Dido’s purpose to avoid marriage is no longer “fixed and immovable” as it had been, because she is no longer governed by Pudor, and hence she no longer pursues the feminine holiness that once upheld her securely in the world of men.

Furthermore, Virgil points clearly to the importance of Sychaeus at Dido’s long death scene. As Dido raves and prays for death, she thinks she hears the voice of her dead husband calling out from the chapel she had built in his honor (4.457–61). Then she condemns herself as deserving her wretched demise (4.547) because of her shame:

Ah, that I could not spend my life apart from wedlock, a blameless life, like some wild creature, and not know such cares! The faith vowed to the ashes of Sychaeus I have not kept. 4.550–52

The feeling of personal guilt, from having forsaken both Pudor and her husband, grabs her and drags her down to the grave.

While surely this inner pain, caused by the self-blame of a violated conscience, is enough to drive most down, there was indeed a second argument from Anna needed to fully corrode Dido’s Diana-like holiness. After attacking Sychaeus, Anna then appeals to Dido’s respect for glory and fame. Anna, in fault, confesses,

I certainly believe that it was with the gods’ favor and Juno’s aid that the Ilian ships held their course hither with the wind. What a city you will see rise here, my sister, what a realm, by reason of such a marriage! With Teucrian arms beside us, to what heights will Punic glory soar? 4.45–49

She is assuming two things here: that Juno would bring Aeneas with favor, and that the blending of peoples is acceptable and beneficial. The temptation is great for Dido, who is both pious and conscious of her fame. Virgil reveals, however, that it was not with Juno’s favor that the Trojan ships crashed in Africa (1.34–49, etc.); and he suggests through Venus that Jupiter would not approve of mixing together two peoples with possibly separate fates (4.111). So when the Trojans and Tyrians do intermix—metaphorically in the hunt scene, as Aeneas “unites his band with hers” (4.141f.)—and when Dido and Aeneas find each other in the cave (4.165f.), Virgil comments,

That day the first of death, the first of calamity was cause. For no more is Dido swayed by fair show or fair fame, no more does she dream of a secret love: she calls it marriage and with that name veils her sin. 4.169–172

The “sin” that Virgil declares is indeed referring as much to her professional defamation—for fair show or fame become naught to her—as to the personal violation of conscience described above. Her concern for fame beforehand contributed to her strength as a queen maintaining political integrity amid the hostile kings in Africa, but she becomes “forgetful of [her] nobler fame” (4.221). Then when Rumor runs rampant throughout Africa, Virgil describes how King Iarbas views the arrangement: that fair Dido has deigned to join herself to a foreigner, and has idly spent the winter in wanton ease, being heedless of her own realm (4.191–194). There is at least as much damage to her professional reputation as upon her own conscience.

So it is apparent that Amor’s poison and Anna’s pleading had to corrode Dido’s conscience in two ways: first by convincing her to compromise her personal resolutions, and second by blinding her sense of professional obligation. Again, these two things are really very closely linked, for it was because of her Diana-like holiness that she maintained political independence, and because of her unwillingness to marry that she kept her conscience clear with regard to Sychaeus. They are both encompassed in her former devotion to Pudor.

Having now explained what was corrupted and in what way, while knowing the eventual end to her tragedy, next the effect of this on Dido’s role as a queen must be further explicated beyond what was stated above.

She eventually confesses to herself that it was political folly to enter such a relationship with Aeneas because it gave him a share in her throne (4.374). Really, however, Virgil suggests that it was more a subjection to him and not a sharing with him. After the word half-spoken by Dido, she craves only to hear Aeneas speak (4.77–79); and after “the works are broken off an idle,” Mercury witnesses Aeneas

. . . founding towers and building new houses. And his sword was starred with yellow jasper, and a cloak hung from his shoulders ablaze with Tyrian purple—a gift that wealthy Dido had wrought, interweaving the web with thread of gold. 4.260–264

Aeneas not only takes on the foreman’s work of construction, but also goes throughout the city wearing gold and purple, Carthage’s royal colors, which Dido is described as wearing elsewhere (4.134–139). He becomes not merely the queen’s husband but indeed the reigning king of Carthage. This sad fact Dido finally acknowledges in her madness before she dies:

What say I? Where am I? What madness turns my brain? Unhappy Dido, do only now your sinful deeds come home to you? Then was the time, when you gave your crown away. 4.595–597

She labels the forfeiture of her sovereignty to Aeneas among her “sinful deeds,” agreeing with Virgil’s earlier comment on her sham marriage. This may shed some light on the dream she has of Aeneas chasing her (4.465f.), since there is a reversal of roles between the one pursuing and the one being pursued, as there is when the image of the huntress becomes that of the prey.

Sadly for Dido, though she recognizes the folly, there is no recovery from her fall. She had been able to redeem the death of Sychaeus, but even Anna could not foresee how much worse Aeneas’s leaving is for Dido (4.500–502). When Sychaeus died, she had something left to her to hold on to, something to live for—that is, the vengeance against Pygmalion and the glory of founding a new Tyrian city apart from his tyranny, albeit with his wealth (1.335–426). Aeneas, however, assumes all her sovereignty while at the same time she casts aside what is most central to her character, which had been founded in the laws of Pudor since the death of Sychaeus. So she to Aeneas:

By these tears and your right hand, I pray you—since nothing else, alas, have I left myself—by the marriage that is ours, . . . put away, I pray, this purpose. Because of you the Libyan tribes and Numidian chiefs hate me, the Tyrians are my foes; because of you I have also lost my honour and that former fame by which alone I was winning a title to the stars. To whose mercy do you leave me on the point of death, guest . . . ? Why do I linger? Is it till Pygmalion, my brother, overthrow this city, or the Gaetulian Iarbas lead me captive? At least, if before your flight a child of yours had been born to me, if in my hall a baby Aeneas were playing, whose face, in spite of all, would bring back yours, I should not think myself utterly vanquished and forlorn. 4.314–330

He left her no posterity, and she provided none for herself. (The childlessness that Anna criticized remains.) Even what she did have is missing, for, in her eyes, her very own people despise her. The former honor was with her when she was alone, but with Aeneas she was depending on a fame that he is providing, and while he lives the former fame cannot be salvaged. With her politics and person gone—that is, without her fame or the vows by which she had maintained the integrity of her conscience—she is left with nothing.

Furthering this point, Virgil gives a subtle image very early in the story through the bard Iopas, who sings of “the wandering moon and sun’s toils” (1.742) among other things that are not so much opposites as things with contrary natures that compliment each other—namely, the origins of humans and beasts, the origins of rain and fire, the meanings of various constellations, the shortness of winter’s sunshine and the length of its nights (1.742–46). Because of the description of the moon as wandering, errantem in the Latin, it is not at all far-fetched to connect the image to Dido, who is repeatedly described as wandering while under the influence of Amor—noting, for example, the doe simile (4.66–73), and the dream of Aeneas’s pursuit where she is “ever wending . . . an endless way” (4.467f.), and also the description of her shade “wandering in the great forest” of the underworld as she weeps (6.451). Thinking of Dido as the errant moon in Iopas’s song, Aeneas, then, is the sun. The moon and sun images also fit with Virgil’s two similes, both set in rural Crete, likening first Dido to Diana and then Aeneas to Apollo (1.496–504, 4.143–150), twin deities connected respectively to the moon and sun.

The light of the moon depends wholly upon the sun’s brilliance. One receives completely from the other. So Dido, in the hours before her death, “prays to whatever power, righteous and mindful, watches over lovers unequally allied” (4.520f.). Their relationship is unequal, unbalanced, because she has taken the role of the moon. Were the light of the sun to leave the world, the moon would cease to shine altogether. By violating her conscience and ignoring her political fame, Dido makes herself vulnerable to such a degree that she is completely dependent upon him. So she, dying, “with wandering [errantibus] eyes sought heaven’s light” (691f.). The moan following this signifies her emptiness, that she is utterly lacking her own glory and can no longer bear what she had forsaken for herself.

It can even be claimed that Dido was dead even before she made the move to plunge a sword into her gut, for Virgil gives her the epithet “Phoenician,” and so when she severs her connection to her old Phoenician home—that is, breaking the vow made to the ashes of Sychaeus—she loses all glory associated with that identity. The glory lost is, again, both political and personal. As soon as she violates the laws of Pudor and forsakes Sychaeus, she ceases to be Carthage’s queen, and she ceases to be Dido at all.

It is clear that her sense of shame is not merely important for preserving dignity and preventing emotional pain; the conscience is a matter of life and death, and from it she has her very self. To compromise conscience is to disavow self. Dido could have survived such a total surrender of her person if only she had given it into willing, nurturing hands. Aeneas, however, never considers himself her husband (4.338f.), and never promises her that his sunlight should shine forever upon her face. He could not have anticipated that his leaving would cause distress so deep (6.464). This fact is at the heart of Dido’s agony. She knows it to be true and judges herself as guilty for violating her own consciousness of right, in the same way that Iarbas judges her disdainfully when he hears of her marriage, and in the same way that she as a sovereign might judge anyone under her power.

Before moving on to address the view of these statements with respect to the whole epic, it is worthwhile to clarify and sum up what has been got at so far. Dido begins as a sovereign over her people and also over herself when the wholeness of her conscience was intact. She is enticed into her folly by being convinced that her old vow, which is held in place by the strength of her conscience, is not worth keeping, and also that her fame would only increase with Aeneas, making the former vow seem inconsequential in light of the new one. When, however, she forsakes her vows to Sychaeus, she really abandons everything about her character that once made her a great queen, and thereafter forfeits her sovereignty to wanton idleness. The loss of political efficacy, in turn, works toward her defamation in Africa and among her own people. So the shame is twofold: she earns bad repute with others and loses favor in her own eyes; she is judged by others as being unfit for sovereignty and judged by herself as unworthy to live. Self-destruction, defamation of the city, and loss of popularity with her people all go hand-in-hand. Anna speaks to this when she cries, “You have destroyed yourself and me together, sister, the Sidonian senate and people, and your city” (4.682f.). The death of Dido’s conscience in this way is the death of her sovereignty and the prefigured death of the city over which she is sovereign.

So can there be anything said concerning shame and conscience for a sovereign in general? For Aeneas is destined to become the progenitor of the Roman race. He is a king giving birth to the greatest of all kings, to whom Jupiter has decreed “empire without end” (1.279). Lest he or any of the kings in his line fall as Dido did, being deceived to allow a foreign thing penetrate their walls as Troy was, Aeneas and his Roman seed ought to have some insight from Dido’s tragedy.

Virgil’s message is not a simplistic exhortation to be more scrupulous than Dido, since the first picture we get of her is impeccable, even godly. There is no one more glorious. Her zeal, too, for her realm is not lacking, but here there is a strange conflict of interest. For though she founded a temple to Juno, her fascination with Troy (1.451–493, 749–756) and her claim to be descended like Aeneas from the same ancient stock as Teucer (1.625f.) do not correspond to the interests of Juno, who was a leader of the Greek forces against Ilium and a hater of all Teucrians besides. While Dido had been diligent to enforce strict border control (1.563f.) and be “high enthroned” (1.506), this fondness for her distant relatives and sympathy for their distress (1.625–629) causes her to be slack on security and go down to a place “in their midst” (1.698). Her piety to Juno is real but somehow not whole.

This same point is further emphasized in her prayers. The first prayer she makes is to Jupiter, Bacchus, and Juno (1.731–734). The appeal to Bacchus here is appropriate insofar as they are going to have a feast and make merry, but to call him laetitiae dator, “giver of joy,” seems to be an ironic epithet for the god whose effects are shown to be rather like madness and self-inflicted pain than joy. This objection to Bacchus is not very firm, but becomes more evident when examining another of Dido’s prayers, one made after she has gulped down Amor’s deception: she prays both to Juno, “guardian of the bonds of marriage,” and to father Lyaeus, which is an epithet of Bacchus (4.58f.). Now Lyaeus, derived from the Greek word λύω, means “one who unfastens,” for this god of wine is known for loosening the tongue and freeing people from their inhibitions. Bacchus, also, is hated by jealous Juno for being an extramarital child of Jupiter with Semele (see Euripides, Bacchae). It is startling, then, to have these two adverse gods—one the protector, the other the undoer of bonds—addressed at once by Dido. It is from Virgil a hint at the origin of her downfall. She has a divided, conflicting piety.

On one hand, being a worshiper of Juno and having Diana-like character, she is concerned for the preservation of her old vow to Sychaeus. On the other hand, being a worshiper of Juno and Bacchus together, she forsakes her concern for old vows and, following an illusion, pursues instead a new and more pleasurable, albeit falsified, marriage. So it is no surprise when Virgil tells us,

Helpless in mind she rages, and all aflame raves through the city, like some Thyiad startled by the shaken emblems, when she has heard the Bacchic cry: the biennial revels fire her and at night Cithaeron summons her with its din. 4.300–303

Her worship of Juno is interrupted by her Bacchic pursuits in the same way as her devotion to Pudor is thrown aside for the possibility of increased fame and pleasure. The double-mindedness multiplies, until she before her death makes appeal to over three hundred gods (4.510). The tension between the several gods is indicative of something very deep within her character, and offers a larger message in the scope of the whole epic.

Her piety is split in too many directions, and her zeal is great for each. The divisions within the queen are what allow deceptive plots, such as Venus’s, to have a foothold. So we find that not only strength of resolve, for the sake of the conscience, but also direction of the resolve is brought out. Though not explicitly stated anywhere, this is a lesson Aeneas must learn if he is to be successful and to effectively father his children. His piety is unrivaled, but he struggles throughout his journey (the episode with Dido is evidence) to keep his focus and resolve on the one goal given to him by the gods. Rome must be a place of fidelity and single-mindedness. It is not a matter of judging one god to be more appropriate than some other god, but seeing the devotion to different gods intermixed is where the start of the problem is found. Of prime importance ought to be the glory of the empire.

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Is Virgil really trying to teach Rome, by teaching Aeneas through Dido, about piety for the sake of the empire? He gives us a story about the love of a queen whose sovereignty is built upon her widowhood, and whose person is entirely invested in the integrity of her conscience. In her strength, she is counted worthy of glory and much fame. Yet though her aim is high, her mission is not founded upon a single, firm foundation. Instead Dido rests on a conglomeration of faiths, having an indefinite hope without vision. Aeneas must be unified within himself, focused only on what the gods have decreed, never willing to bind himself to anything other than what will marry him to his fate. So for any Roman sovereign: he must be single-minded and zealous, pressing on the work of the ever-rising empire.

1 All English quotations are from the Loeb Classical Library’s 1999 revision of H. Rushton Fairclough’s translation. The line numbers cited correspond to the Latin text in that edition.