A.Schiesaro, Dido\'s Kulturkampf

ALESSANDRO SCHIESARO (Rome/London)

Under the Sign of Saturn: Dido’s Kulturkampf “Warum zeigen unsere Verwandten, die Tiere, keinen solchen Kulturkampf? Oh, wir wissen es nicht.” “Why do our relatives, the animals, show no sign of such a cultural struggle? Oh, we don’t know.” S. Freud, Civilization and its Discontents1

1. The topic of ‘time in the Aeneid’ is an immensely complex one, and I can only hope to tackle some aspects of it in this paper.2 I want to look specifically here at Dido. My starting point, however, will be the equivalence established in Roman mythological thought between Kronos and Chronos, the original leader of the Titans and old father Time. We are dealing, to be sure, with a very ancient identification, which probably harks back to Orphic allegory, but acquires in Rome further implications when Kronos is translated into the shape and name of Saturn. This paper will not discuss the mythological and allegorical vicissitudes of Kronos/Chronos and their cultural genealogies. I mention them at the outset, however, as a reminder of how distant the Romans’ image of Time is from our scientific, rational concept, and of how important it is to extend the study of time in Virgil’s poem beyond the boundaries of socio-political and cultural time, to include what could be comprehensively defined as ‘psychological time’.3 Time, in more than one sense, does not exist if not in our perception, and recent work in the area of child analysis, for instance, makes tantalizing connections between the emergence of temporality in infants and patterns of desire and frustration. Cicero the rationalist offers the standard text for the interpretation of Saturnus-Kronos as Time: Saturnus autem est appellatus quod saturaretur annis; ex 1

Freud (1929/30 = 2002), p. 60. Which should be read in conjunction with Damien Nelis’ important contribution in this volume. Mack (1978) remains a useful starting point. Recent work, in the wake of Brooks (1992) and Quint’s (1993) splendid essay, has focussed especially on the affective experience of the readers and their involvement in the dialectics between the teleological drive of the epic plot and its narrative complication through delays and detours. 3 Similar questions concern Schiesaro (2003b), pp. 177-220, and id. (2003c). 2

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se enim natos comesse fingitur solitus, quia consumit aetas temporum spatia annisque praeteritis insuperabiliter expletur. vinctus autem a Iove, ne inmoderatos cursus haberet, atque ut eum siderum vinclis alligaret (nat. deor. 2. 64). It would be easy to dismiss this as a remarkable story (it appealed even to Augustine), as a particularly florid instance of Stoic allegory gone wild, but it may be more profitable to contemplate, for a moment, its assumptions and implications. The first thing we should notice is a curious disjunction between the abstract notion of time – aetas – and the individual years. This disjunction is very far from a unified view of time within which any man-made subdivision is little more than a convenient bookmark, not an ontologically distinct entity. But aetas and anni aren’t just two different entities; their relationship is dialectical at best, conflictual at worst. There is no uninterrupted flowing of the eternal time, but rather a succession of years which are generated and return – literally – to their maker. This image of cannibalistic ingestion, shot through with implications of incest, resists allegorical rationalisation. Roman culture is prepared to imagine time not just as an all-consuming force of nature, but as a cannibalistic Titan who consumes his own children. Time, or, should we say, Father Chronos, emerges as a tormented repository of fears, anxieties, primeval imagination, nostalgia for the return to a state of indivisibility and indistinctness vis à vis an allpowerful parent. This image of time provides an alluring starting point, and evokes from the outset a number of concerns with which modern thought, and especially psychoanalysis, continues to grapple with: for example, the regressive nature of desire and its lack of temporality, or, we should say, a radically alternative form of temporality; the connections between desire, incest and nostalgia; the homology between male and female principles of generation. In short, these concepts, all fairly familiar in our post-Freudian intellectual universe, seem to be encompassed, or at least suggested, in this haunting personification. Kronos, with his links to Bal and Saturnus (and Juno and Dido themselves), will shadow this paper’s discussion of the influence of unconscious fantasies4 in the articulation of time categories in the Aeneid, as perceived and expressed by the epic’s most engaging character, Dido, in the context of her affective drives. 2. Dido stands in Virgil’s poem as the most powerful incarnation of a radically alternative world-view. Thrown on the shores of a potentially hostile land, welcomed (not without divine intervention) by a generous and attractive queen whose fate is in many respects parallel to his own, Aeneas is faced – for the first time – with a real alternative to his life’s business, the search of a new homeland for his displaced people. The false foundations which dotted the early part of his wanderings, even the emotional encounter with Andromache’s pathetic (and 4

The influence of unconscious fantasy, together with perception, memory and self-awareness is one of the “four essential determinants of the time experience” taken into account in psychoanalytic discussions of time (Arlow 1986, p. 517). I will not deal here with the methodological issues raised by applying psychoanalytic categories to a literary character.

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pathological) solution to a similar problem (how can the defeated Trojans construct a new Troy?), were temporary, limited, and altogether unviable detours. Carthage is different. There he can become the co-regent, but effectively the king, of a prosperous new land; his people can fuse with the locals; royal succession would be guaranteed by Ascanius, or, down the line, by the child he will eventually conceive with Dido, the queen with whom he has fallen in love: we can glimpse a wholly different world-history. The text is ready to acknowledge how much Aeneas is tempted by this unexpected scenario: coming to Carthage on Juppiter’s orders, Mercury finds him fundantem arces ac tecta novantem (4. 260), forgetful (oblitus) of his reign and his mission (267). All of these developments, of course, had been accurately planned by the protagonists’ divine sponsors. Juno explicitly states her project of a multicultural Carthage, one people (4. 102 communem [...] populum) under the supposedly joint protection of Venus and herself (1. 102 sq. paribus regamus / auspiciis). Venus is aware that the plan is yet another manifestation of Juno’s attempt to forestall Aeneas’ arrival in Italy (105 sq.),5 and wonders whether Juppiter would approve of this elision of differences between Trojans and Tyrians: sed fatis incerta feror, si Iuppiter unam / velit Tyriis urbem Troiaque profectis, / miscerive probet populos aut foedera iungi (110-12).6 To Venus’ (and Juppiter’s) linear movement forward in time and space, Juno opposes delays, detours, and amalgamations of opposites. The contrast between these two systems plays itself out, in the narrative structure of the poem, at both the spatial and chronological levels, never to find an unambiguous resolution. They clearly represent more than two possible plotlines, but involve, at a deeper level, the epistemic and psychological foundations of culture. Juppiter and Juno represent, in this respect, the uneliminable differences which shape human experience at the conscious and unconscious level, and can define their own position thanks to the very existence of their opposite. When the two gods finally reach an agreement of sorts which brings the poem to an end, this happens on the basis of a partial compromise which highlights the mutual dependence between these two systems of thought rather than their neat opposition. Now that Juno’s alternative plot-line has been defeated on the battlefield, it is Juppiter’s turn to endorse the logic of ethnic fusion (12. 838 genus [...] mixtum), and metaphorically sow the seed of future internal discord, for fusion can only be, always, imperfect and incomplete.7 The modes of thought and action championed by each member of the divine couple chart a fundamental opposition that finds a significant parallel in modern psychoanalytical thought, which, especially in its post-Freudian developments, has explored the opposition between the ‘Aristotelian’ linearity of conscious 5

At 105 Venus accuses Juno of talking simulata mente. Cf. also 1. 574: Tros Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur. 7 This time it is in Juno’s interest, of course, that the fusion be incomplete (cf. 12. 835: commixti corpore tantum), so that future developments can call into question again the Jovian settlement. 6

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thinking and the lack of boundaries and distinctions (categorical, spatial, chronological) which characterizes the logic of the unconscious.8 Juno, the allpowerful, archaic, Saturnian goddess of impossible desires and illicit alternatives, Juppiter’s opposite, and yet his wife and sister, embodies the attractions and dangers inherent in this mode of thinking. At several crucial junctures in the poem Juno’s unlucky disciple, Dido, displays the same patterns of thought: this paper, which is part of a larger study of Dido’s characterization, will look at some relevant instances, focussing especially on her attitude towards time. 3. Dido’s dream in the centre of Book 4 offers an important starting-point for reflections on ‘psychological time’ in the Aeneid. I will limit myself to a brief recapitulation of the main points of interest that the dream presents for the purpose of my present topic.9 Dido’s dream is characterised by a marked confusion of categories, both functional (subject/object; victim/killer; avenger/avenged) and familial (mother/lover). She sees herself as a betrayed wife, yet she also evokes the spectre of murdering mothers, matricidal sons, and – in turn – avenging mothers. As it elides differences and oppositions, the dream also displays the usual tendency of unconscious thought to shape the perception of time on the basis of desires and fears.10 Here Dido projects into eternity – or timelessness – her unhappy fate: semper she is abandoned, semper will she wander in a search clearly without end. The demands of emotion overcome those of chronology not only in her dreams. When she reproaches Anna for her insistence that she yield to the passion for Aeneas, the use of present tenses shows that – for Dido – the offence, the pain, are still in the here and now (and always): his, germana, malis oneras atque obicis hosti (4. 549).11 The dream is preceded by a section where Dido’s dead husband Sychaeus, now an uncanny revenant, reasserts his emotional rights over her (4. 450-65). This coniugium antiquum (4. 458 echoes 4. 431) whose memory Dido has objectively betrayed through her relationship with Aeneas, comes back to haunt her. The poignancy and importance of this scene hinges on its combination of the hallucinatory and the metaphorical. Sychaeus’ ghost personifies the feelings of guilt and anxiety which torture Dido at this juncture, and marks a disturbance of her perception of time: Sychaeus is both alive and dead; he died, and yet never did die.12 The atmosphere of the scene, and its symbolic implications, already gesture towards the anxiety-ridden ghost scenes which characterize – say – Seneca’s Thyestes and Agamemnon, or the return of Hector in Troades. Indeed, the return of the dead becomes here, as in Troades,13 a return to the dead, for Dido realises that her only option is to turn back the clock on her life and ignore the 8

Cf. esp. Matte Blanco (1975). For a fuller investigation see Schiesaro (forthcoming). 10 References to Freud and further bibliography in Schiesaro (2003b), p. 210, n. 80. 11 On the ‘eternal present’ of anger see Freud (1900 = 1913), pp. 577 sq. 12 I elaborate on the model proposed by Fink (1993), p. 306. 13 Schiesaro (2003b), pp. 190-202. 9

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future for the past. Let us now fast forward to a section of the narrative where Dido, directly after Mercury spells out to Aeneas how dangerous it is to delay his departure, finally confesses her murderous feelings. By now, of course, it is too late, because Aeneas is gone, and Dido can only express her regret at not having acted earlier (600-606): non potui abreptum divellere corpus et undis spargere? non socios, non ipsum absumere ferro Ascanium patriisque epulandum ponere mensis? verum anceps pugnae fuerat fortuna. – fuisset: quem metui moritura? faces in castra tulissem implessemque foros flammis natumque patremque cum genere extinxem, memet super ipsa dedissem.

In this sustained fantasy of counterfactual revenge Dido brings together a number of well-known paradigms, most notably the maschalismos of Medea’s brother Absyrtus (whose name may be evoked in the repetition abreptum/absumere), and Procne’s killing of her son Itys. Procne is not the only mythical character credited with this particularly horrid form of revenge, but she is the only one whose motives resemble Dido’s – she, too, has been betrayed by her husband.14 The reference to Ascanius in the context of this counterfactual wish retrospectively casts a dark shadow on a previous, equally impossible desire which Dido had voiced in her first impassioned reaction to Aeneas’ traitorous plans (327-330): saltem si qua mihi de te suscepta fuisset ante fugam suboles, si quis mihi parvulus aula luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret, non equidem omnino capta ac deserta viderer.

This passage, emotional as it is, tends to inspire moving, even sentimental remarks,15 partly because the rare diminutive parvulus points to Catullus’ poem 61, where the picture of Torquatus (...) parvulus projects an image of future conjugal bliss.16 To begin with, more should be made of the fact that Dido is reversing, here, Medea’s argument in Euripides’ play. As the tragic Medea points out, it is precisely because Jason isn’t j that his betrayal is all the more unforgivable (488-491): the existence of children stands as the greatest indictment of 14

A further point of contact between Procne and Dido is the linking of Procne’s story with a Dionysian setting (Virgil repeatedly emphasizes Dido’s Bacchic-like features): Burkert (1997), p. 203. 15 According to Austin ad 328, for instance, both texts point forward “to another Italy, the Italy of the great renaissance painters”. 16 Cat. 61. 209-213: Torquatus volo parvulus / matris e gremio suae / porrigens teneras manus / dulce rideat ad patrem / semihiante labello.

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his behaviour, and, eventually, becomes the most appropriate vehicle of retribution. Within Virgil’s text linguistic faultlines conspire to complicate the moving picture of Dido as “a real and tender woman”17 pining over the lack of any consolation for her unfortunate passion. Indeed, line 329 raises substantial exegetical difficulties, which most critics and commentators, with the notable exception of Henry, tend to overlook or explain away. According to Henry’s lucid account the touching insistence on the similarity between father and son in qui te tamen ore referret is jarring for at least three reasons: (i) the line “expresses more tenderness and affection than is consistent with the highly reproachful, upbraiding character of the rest of the speech”; (ii) “it is tautologous” (parvulus Aeneas already conveys the concept); (iii) “TE derives an inappropriate emphasis from being thus placed as first syllable of the dactyl TE TAMEN”.18 Henry disposes of these perceived incongruencies by opting for the alternative reading tantum, known to Servius,19 and attested in the recentiores, which is expressively weak and stylistically doubtful, but does produce a reassuring train of thought. Commentators and translators, who on the whole retain tamen, assign to it what Pease calls an “elliptic force”: Dido would be happy to have a parvulus Aeneas resembling his father “in spite of everything”, in spite, that is, of Aeneas’ betrayal and departure.20 Given that some parallels exist for a use of tamen whose concessive force is directed against an unexpressed set of circumstances inferred from the preceding context,21 it is unwarranted to endorse Henry’s radical therapy. But neither can his sombre diagnosis be dismissed out of hand: the difficulties he points out are substantial, and unaffected by the ‘elliptic’ interpretation of tamen. There is one further, and more intractable, difficulty. The normal meaning of tamen following a relative pronoun is “who however”, “although he”,22 and the relative clause “acts as a parenthesis or aside”.23 Thus the expected meaning of qui te tamen ore referret is ‘[I wish I had a small Aeneas playing in the house] although in/with his face he would remind me of you’.24 Once again Dido’s ‘difficult’ language alerts us to a fault-line in her feelings,25 17

Austin ad 328. Henry (1873-92) ad 2. 705. 19 As Pease ad 329 remarks, tantum must be presumed in one of the explanations Servius offers: optarem filium similem vultui, non moribus tuis. 20 Cf. Page ad 329: “[t]he beautiful tamen ‘notwithstanding’ is untranslateable, because the suppressed thought opposed to it must be supplied or suggested in translation”. 21 Pease quotes – e.g. – Ecl. 10. 31 and Aen. 9. 248, though admitting that the elliptic force of tamen “has been much disputed”. For the principle, and further examples, see Kühner/Stegmann (1955), p. 98. 22 Lewis-Short s.v. G. 23 OLD s.v. 6. 24 No commentator, as far as I know, deals with this particular difficulty, although Henry’s perceptive remarks point in the same general direction (note especially his comment on the emphasis which the line places on te). 25 Saltem at the beginning of line 327 is also charged with an unusual degree of emotion, and 18

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and to a conflict between contrasting emotions26. Perhaps it is not impossible to allow tamen the “consolatory force” (Conington) which most interpreters prefer to foreground, but it is equally impossible, I believe, to silence its more regular, strongly concessive value. Dido is torn between two contrasting emotions: the wish to have a small child resembling his father – a natural expectation for which literary testimonials can readily be found27 – and the sudden realisation that the child would inevitably resemble the man who betrayed her, and whose imago, at times reflected in Ascanius’ face (4. 83 sq.), has become her obsession (466).28 Ovid implicitly underlines the upsetting nature of the potential resemblance between Aeneas and his child by using the same verb – referre – in his description of the nocturnal obsessions which haunt Dido in Her. 7. 26: Aenean animo noxque diesque refert. Dido’s suggestive, if unconscious, play with the language of infanticide (which, as we will see, was not lost on Ovid),29 is particularly striking given the fact that her own people had indulged in this practice,30 a prime example, for the Romans, of the Carthaginians’ notorious crudelitas.31 Rome’s foundational epic, Ennius’ Annales, explicitly states that Poeni soliti suos sacrificare puellos (221 V.2 = Sk. 214),32 while Silius’ Punica expand at some length on a specific poignant episode (4. 765-773):33 mos fuit in populis, quos condidit advena Dido, poscere caede deos veniam ac flagrantibus aris, departs from normal usage (it would normally follow the word it refers to): Soubiran (1961), p. 37. 26 As neatly postulated by a great master of stylistic criticism directly influenced by Freud: “to every emotion, that is, to every distancing from our normal psychological state, corresponds, in the field of expression, a distancing from normal linguistic usage; and, conversely, […] a distancing from usual language is a sign of an unusual psychological state” (Spitzer 1951, vol. I., p. 4). 27 Pease ad 329. The concept and the language are Lucretian: fit quoque ut interdum [sc. nati] exsistere avorum/ possint et referant proavorum saepe figuras (4. 1218 sq.); inde Venus varia producit sorte figuras/ maiorumque refert vultus vocesque comasque (4. 1223 sq.). 28 The same sequence of thoughts – a desire whose unintended negative corollaries are suddenly, painfully grasped – is expressed by Seneca’s Thyestes, who delights in imagining that a festive throng will welcome him back from exile – but Atreus, too, will be among them: occurret Argos, populus occurret frequens –/ sed nempe et Atreus (411 sq.). 29 Cf. pp. 94 sq. 30 Specific remarks on the ritual sacrifice of children to Baal-Saturnus-Chronus in Curt., 4. 3. 23 (who specificies that the puer must be ingenuus), Just., 18. 6. 11 sq., Diod., 13. 86. 3, Aug., civ. 7. 26 (Plin., nat. 36. 39, and Plut., mor. 171c do not mention children). Further sources are discussed by Atkinson in his commentary on Curt., 4. 3. 23 (Atkinson 1998, p. 349). For modern accounts see Brown (1989) and Rives (1995). 31 See Cic., Lael. 28, and, in general, Horsfall (1973-74). 32 The text is controversial. I print Skutsch’s. 33 On the passage cf. Bruère (1952), pp. 222-24, who identifies Curtius as the source of this passage.

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Silius’ brief narrative displays several intriguing features. Dido is explicitly brought into the picture by way of a correct but hardly unavoidable aetiological periphrasis; the comparison between the Carthaginians’ rites and those performed in Tauris at the temple of Thoantean Diana34 affords a transcultural comparison which, again, is as interesting as it is dispensable in the economy of the scene, but which may uncomfortably remind Virgil’s readers of the foundational comparison between Dido and Diana in the Aeneid; last but not least, line 773 shows a marked resemblance to Aen. 4. 84 sq.: aut gremio Ascanium genitoris imagine capta / detinet, infandum si fallere possit amorem (with infandum diffracted at 767).35 Like Ascanius, Hannibal’s son is the chosen victim as a substitute for his absent father, though in this case the resemblance between them ultimately persuades the Carthaginians to spare his life.36 While Silius’ passage is almost uncanny in its reverberations of problematic as34

Ovid refers to the cruel rites performed at the temple of Thoantean Diana in Trist. 4. 4. 63, cf. also Trist. 1. 9. 28; Pont. 3. 2. 59; Ibis 384 and Val. Fl., 8. 208, Sil., 14. 260. The archetype is Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Tauris, e.g. lines 32 sq. (Cropp, ad loc., notices the “intriguing similarities” between Thoas [‘the swift one’] and swift-footed Achilles, whom Iphigeneia expected to marry; the connection is interesting in the light of the Iphigeneia-intertext which plays a role in Virgil’s Dido, see later p. 95, n. 52). 35 Cf. also Sil., 4. 766: poscere caede deos veniam with Aen. 4. 50: tu modo posce deos veniam, and Sil., 4. 766 sq.: aris, / infandum dictu! parvos imponere natos with Aen. 4. 453 sq.: turicremis cum dona imponeret aris, / (horrendum dictu!) latices nigrescere sacros (the only occurrence of imponere aris in the Aeneid). Some of these intertexts are noted by Bruère (1952), p. 226, n. 23, who regards them as “incidental echoes”. 36 Human sacrifice is regularly viewed in Roman culture as a peculiarly horrific Carthaginian custom, but while ritual infanticide is at best intimated in Dido’s words, it is overtly associated with Aeneas (and possibly with Augustus himself, since readers may well have been reminded of the accounts according to which Octavian had performed human sacrifices at Perusia in 41 BC. Cf. Harrison [1997], p. 203, p. 304, who remains, however, sceptical) later in the poem (10. 517-20): quattuor hic iuvenes, totidem quos educat Ufens, / viventis rapit, inferias quos immolet umbris / captivoque rogi perfundat sanguine flammas (the sacrifice is fulfilled at 11. 81 sq.). The extraordinary decision to select four youths for sacrifice is a direct consequence of the terrible news that has just reached Aeneas. Pallas is dead (510-515), and his image and that of his father Evander assail Aeneas (515-17): Pallas, Evander, in ipsis/ omnia sunt oculis, mensae quas advena primas/ tunc adiit, dextraeque datae. The sacrifice of the four young men – iuvenis – is a direct response, in fact a compensation for the elimination of the iuvenis Pallas, himself the catalyzer, vis à vis Aeneas, of complex feelings including paternal predilection and erotic attraction.

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pects of Dido’s attitude in the Aeneid, Ovid’s reworking of the queen’s story in Heroides 7 also provides an important parallel. I will sidestep in this context a general discussion of Ovid’s rewriting of the Virgilian model, and limit myself to the specific point raised by Dido’s wish for Aeneas’ child.37 Suffice it to say that even as Ovid turns his Dido into a frank character who clearly outlines to Aeneas the available options and sees rage and violence only as a last resort, the text allows us to see that certain aspects of Virgilian Dido’s ambivalent and dangerous character are not lost on him. Lines 23 sq. – uror ut inducto ceratae sulpure taedae, / ut pia fumosis addita tura focis – are a case in point. The simile exploits the metaphorical association of love with fire while also introducing an open-ended funereal overtone – Dido is thinking here of her own ‘funeral-aswedding’, but the memory of Aen. 4. 604 sq. (faces in castra tulissem, / implessemque foros flammis) prevents the exclusion of a more aggressive arrièrepensée. More significantly, Ovid pictures the storm threatening Aeneas as a projection of Dido’s rage, almost the embodiment of her feelings, thus reminding us of Juno’s emotions in the opening book of the Aeneid. Ovid’s strategy is particularly eloquent in the unexpected reference to Dido’s potential pregnancy at 133138: forsitan et gravidam Dido, scelerate, relinquas parsque tui lateat corpore clausa meo. accedet fatis matris miserabilis infans, et nondum nati funeris auctor eris, cumque parente sua frater morietur Iuli, poenaque conexos auferet una duos.

The transition from Dido’s unrealised desire38 to carry Aeneas’ child to her raising the suspicion that she may actually be pregnant considerably heightens the emotional impact of her appeal to him: at the very least, Aeneas would be abandoning Iulius’ baby brother (heir, incidentally, to the new Trojan-Carthaginian kingdom Dido has been envisaging), but if his departure precipitates Dido’s demise he will actually be responsible for two deaths, not just one.39 Ovid’s text, moreover, appears actively to counter the suspicion of infanticide which we can trace in Aeneid 4: here Iulus is alive and well, safely removed from any threat on Dido’s part. If there is any question of infanticide, it would be Aeneas’ fault as funeris auctor. But the intertexts Ovid evokes as he sketches this one-sided picture tell a more disturbing story. The juxtaposition of numerals at line 138 reworks40 another Ovidian line, Am. 2. 13. 15: huc adhibe vultus et in una parce 37

Which is developed in Schiesaro (forthcoming). Virgil’s Dido is, however, metaphorically pregnant: at 4. 518 – unum exuta pedem vinclis – Servius notes that Iunonis Lucinae sacra non licet accedere nisi solutis nodis. Her offspring will come at a later time in history (625: exoriare aliquis ex nostris ossibus ultor). 39 Cf. Knox ad 133-8: “By reminding Aeneas of this possibility, O[vid]’s Dido heightens the reader’s sense of his guilt”. 40 Knox ad loc. 38

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duobus,41 which, in turn, harks back to Prop., 2. 28. 41: si non unius, quaeso, miserere duorum! Both poems deal with the sickness of the poet’s beloved, but in Amores 2. 13 Corinna is lying ill because she has had an abortion, and tried to get rid of the latens (...) onus (2. 13. 20) in her womb.42 Ovid voices his feelings about this practice in the following poem: there, et nondum natis dira venena datis (2. 14. 28), a patent model for Her. 7. 136, introduces an enraged reference to Medea stained by her children’s blood and Procne slaughtering Itys (2. 13. 29 sq.) – both women are incarnations of a saeva parens (2. 14. 31). In the context of her pathetic appeal to Aeneas, therefore, Dido’s choice of language is at the very least unfortunate, and underscores the persistence of the threatening elements of her nature even in Ovid’s overall reassuring recasting: in order to punish Aeneas she is prepared to let their child die with her. Ovid’s “gentler”43 Dido cannot retroactively invalidate the suspicion that Virgil’s heroine harbours violent thoughts even as she appears resigned. On the contrary, I would argue, first, that his elegiac reinterpretation44 of the Aeneid testifies to Ovid’s awareness of those thoughts precisely because they are systematically (if not comprehensively) erased or displaced; and, secondly, that his Dido affects a “literal relationship to language and meaning”45 precisely because verbal ambiguity was the primary means deployed by Virgil in the articulation of Dido’s emotional complexity, and therefore, in Ovid’s eyes, “complexity is just a way of excusing Aeneas”.46 As literalness attempts to erase verbal dexterity and ambiguity, enough traces of Dido’s old expressive habits persist to show the constructedness of Ovid’s strategy, which is as subjective and partial as that of his predecessor. I doubt whether Ovid’s Dido could safely be used as a character witness in the attempt to read Aeneid 4 as a fight between Dido’s “humble renunciation”47 and Aeneas’ unrelieved callousness. Ovid is always a partial and interested – in a word, polemical – reader of Virgil, who consistently “draws attention to troubled or ambiguous aspects” of the Aeneid, in order to “brin[g] out what was already there in Virgil”.48 Crucially, he does so both when, for instance, he reinterprets Aeneas’s apologetic longe servet vestigia coniunx as an outright desertion (Her. 7. 83 sq.: si quaeras ubi sit formosi mater Iuli / occidit a duro sola relicta viro),49 and when he retrospectively validates the threatening 41

A line which displays its own share of subversive irony, since it initially seems to suggest that the baby is still alive, and only subsequently makes clear that the second person to be spared is Ovid himself: see McKeown ad loc. 42 For lateo in similar contexts cf. Seneca’s Medea at Med. 1012-13: in matre si quod pignus etiamnunc latet,/ scrutabor ense viscera et ferro extraham. 43 Jacobson (1974), p. 85. 44 Desmond (1993). 45 Desmond (1993), p. 65. 46 Tarrant (2002), p. 25. 47 Heinze (1915), p. 103. 48 Thomas (2001), pp. 79 and 80. 49 Knox (1995), p. 216; Thomas (2001), pp. 78 sq.

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‘further voices’ which he sees lurking in Virgil’s Dido.50 The Aeneid (as Ovid confirms) makes us wonder whether, alongside the strength of love, generosity and sorrow which characterises Dido, the dark reality of her Carthaginian nature wasn’t all the time ready to reassert its rights. This, to be sure, had been Venus’ worry from the very start of Aeneas’ stay in Africa.51 Dido herself ultimately confirms that human sacrifice does indeed occur in Carthage by sacrificing herself on a ritual pyre. As she does so, she becomes a new Iphigeneia,52 the child-victim whose fate is evoked at 425-430: Dido’s death will guarantee the Trojans the very opposite of the felix faustusque exitus53 sought by the Trojans in Aulis. The ‘further voice’ which can be discerned in Dido’s parenthetical qui te tamen ore referret turns the cheerful resemblance of son to father into a potentially ominous feature. This similarity inevitably represents a complex signifier of erotic tension, as it encapsulates in socially acceptable terms a blurring of the distinction between objects of erotic attraction on the one hand and of maternal love on the other. In the Aeneid, Ascanius, who is and isn’t Dido’s ‘son’, but strongly resembles Aeneas,54 catalyses the multifaceted affections of a woman whose family tree interestingly connects her with Phaedra.55 Once love stories turn out horribly wrong – as in the case of Medea and Procne, for instance – it is precisely this similarity which makes children the substitute victim of choice in the eyes of a revengeful mother. This motif is adumbrated in Euripides, who remarks more than once that the sight of her children has become ‘hateful’ to Medea,56 while Ovid makes it explicit57 both in his treatment of Medea in the Heroides58 and of Procne in the Metamorphoses59 (a tale which in this as in other respects is heavily contaminated with that of Medea).60 Once again Seneca’s Medea offers a more direct reelaboration of the motif. As she gropes for a powerful revenge against Jason, Medea regrets that he does not have a brother: utinam esset illi frater! est coniunx: in hanc / ferrum exigatur (125 sq.). The 50

The assertion that “the so-called ‘pessimistic’ reading of the Aeneid, current in so much modern criticism of Virgil, began with O[vid and ...] forms the basis for his portrayal of Dido in this epistle” (Knox, 1995, p. 202) is thus at best partial. 51 Cf. 1. 670-675. 52 On the analogies between this episode and Lucretius’ Iphigenia see DuBois (1976). 53 With Lucr. 1. 100: exitus ut classi felix faustusque daretur cf. Aen. 4. 430: expectet facilemque fugam ventosque ferentis (the allitteration is significant). 54 Cf. 4. 84, quoted above, p. 92. 55 Foster (1973-74), p. 31. 56 Cf. 36, 101, 112, 116. 57 For details see Bessone’s excellent note on Her. 7. 189. 58 189 sq.: et nimium similes tibi sunt, et imagine tangor, / et, quotiens video, lumina nostra madent. 59 6. 620-23: ad matrem veniebat Itys: quid possit, ab illo / admonita est oculisque tuens inmitibus ‘a, quam / es similis patri!’ dixit nec plura locuta / triste parat facinus tacitaque exaestuat ira. 60 Larmour (1990).

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verses which follow make it clear that Jason’s brother would share Absyrtus’ fate. In this instance, too, the Aeneid offers belated confirmation that Dido has nurtured confused, unconscious feelings of revenge from the moment Aeneas’ intentions have been detected. References and allusions, explicit or otherwise, consistently hark back to obsessively recurring motifs – the killing of children, brothers, or mothers. Once these mythic paradigms are evoked in the context of the relationship between Aeneas and Dido, incestuous implications are inescapable. Absyrtus is Medea’s brother, Pentheus, Orestes and Itys sons of Agave, Clytemnestra, Procne. Procne’s revenge is provoked by the incestuous relationship between her husband and her own sister – a fear to which Dido, as we can discern in her dealings with Anna, is not immune. Dido’s story creatively stages the nexus between aggressive and incestuous drives which characterises these mythical paradigms. The insistent intertextual connection with the story of Medea and Absyrtus61 is obviously linked to the important role that fratricidal strife plays in Dido’s own life: furor intervenes between Dido and her brother Pygmalion (1. 348) and sets in motion the death of Sychaeus (4. 21: sparsos fraterna caede penates),62 Dido’s revenge63 and her exile. In the pithy epitaph the queen offers for herself shortly before dying, her revenge against Pygmalion is distinctly foregrounded: ulta virum poenas inimico a fratre recepi (4. 656). But we should also notice that the Phoenician prologue to Dido’s wanderings, too, establishes a powerful link between her own and Aeneas’ Bildungsroman. Textual markers emphasize the parallelism between their departures from Tyre and Troy respectively: Sychaeus is killed ante aras (1. 349), Priamus altaria ad ipsa (2. 550); the image of Sychaeus comes back to alert Dido (1. 353 sq. inhumati venit imago / coniugis), just as that of Priamus appears to Aeneas (2. 560 subiit cari genitoris imago); the ghosts of Sychaeus and Venus order a hasty departure and offer their help.64 It is against this background of similarity – indeed almost specularity – that we must read the clustering of incestuous models in Dido’s self-fashioning, which thus brings to a head a perceptible, if understated, feature of the narrative of her relationship with Aeneas. From the very first time they are introduced – Dido is compared to Diana, Aeneas to Apollo –, the text underscores a peculiar form of closeness between

61

Apollonius’ Medea (unlike Euripides’) is not alien to incestuous projection vis à vis Jason: see 4. 368 sq., with Paduano/Fusillo ad loc. 62 Fraterna caede can mean both ‘the murder committed by my brother Pygmalion’, and ‘the fratricide committed by Pygmalion’, if Pygmalion and Sychaeus are to be considered kinsmen (fratres): according to a tradition recorded by Iustin. 18. 4. 5, Sychaeus (whom he calls Acherba), was Dido’s and Pygmalion’s avunculus (Pease ad 20). Cf. Servius ad 4. 21. 63 A further point of contact between Dido’s and Orestes’ story: Foster (1973-74), p. 37. 64 1. 357-59: tum celerare fugam patriaque excedere suadet / auxiliumque viae veteres tellure recludit / thesauros; 2. 619-20: eripe, nate, fugam finemque impone labori; / numquam abero et tutum patrio te limine sistam.

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the soon-to-be lovers.65 The pair of similes suggests that the two very much resemble each other, are indeed ‘doubles’ linked by a potentially incestuous bond.66 Once their love story is over, Dido’s murderous fantasy implicitly acknowledges that bond, and its unsustainability. Virgil’s insistence on the ominous implications of the relationship can be seen to underscore, at a fundamental and unarguable level, the tragic impossibility of the lovers’ liaison – a transference to the level of darkly intuited taboos of the obstacles which traditionally beset doomed love stories. 4. The most complex, and certainly the most moving, of Dido’s counterfactual wishes and desires, is the one she expresses in her final farewell to Anna at lines 550-552: non licuit, thalami expertem sine crimine vitam degere more ferae, talis nec tangere curas; non servata fides cineri promissa Sychaeo.

This time I will sidestep a discussion of the complexities of Dido’s syntax. Let it suffice to say that Henry (again) devotes a number of pages to a painstaking analysis of – effectively – the first line only.67 At least since Quintilian readers have been attuned to the ironic undertones of the queen’s words, which are used in the Institutio as a prime example of emphasis, a figure through which ex aliquo dicto latens aliquid eruitur (9. 2. 64): according to Quintilian, Dido believes that unwedded life is “fit for beasts rather than for humans”. The key words here are more ferae, which are open to different interpretations (Austin, for instance, embarassedly admits that they imply not simplicity, but bestiality).68 It is productive to regard more ferae as a direct link to the notion of life more ferarum which plays a central role in Lucretius’ analysis of early civilization and progress.69 At 5. 932 primitives are said to have led life vulgivago (...) more ferarum, where the adjective is bound to recall the praise of vulgivaga (...) Venus at 4. 1071 – a sexual life with no firm commitments or rules (a point emphasized in Horace’s own take on the expression).70 And at 4. 1264 more ferarum had in65

The double similes is all the more upsetting in the light of the identification between Venus and Diana established at 1. 314-20. 66 Van Nortwick (1996), pp. 112-116; Oliensis (1997), pp. 305-07; Schiesaro (2003a), pp. xxiv sq.; Hardie (2002). About Dido as Aeneas’ ‘alter ego’ in Otis (1963), p. 236. Cf. Clausen (2002), pp. 34-40 for the intertextual links to Apollonius’ Medea- and Jason-similes. 67 Henry (1873-92), pp. 789-801. 68 While Pease had stressed that “Dido [...] is not longing for the free love of beasts, simple and innocent though they may appear, but recognizes that such love was not permissible for her and that she should not have indulged in it”. 69 Recent works on Dido’s Epicurean overtones, the valuable articles by Dyson (1996) and Gordon (1998), do not discuss more ferae. On Lucretian echoes in Book 4 see also Hamilton (1993). 70 Sat. 1. 3. 109 sq.: quos [sc. ‘warriors’] Venerem incertam rapientis more ferarum / viribus

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deed been used to describe a specific sexual position.71 Critics strive hard to preserve Dido’s dignified words from any contamination with admittedly more unexpected concepts, but an understanding of her words will not come from emphasizing the stark contrast between rural simplicity and sexual unruliness. I doubt, with Conington and others, that Dido is emerging here as an early advocate of free love, or adventurous sex. What she arguably has in mind is more general and more radical: a reversion to a stage in the history of mankind where the superstructures of civilization and history have not yet taken hold, and where the satisfaction of basic human needs has not lost the uncomplicated immediacy which animals still display. This is the status quo ante Lucretius describes in the second half of Book 5, a sort of zero-degree of humanity where the distinctiveness of the human experience itself, which is based on gradual, material changes vis à vis the animal world, not on a preordained ontological difference, is still weak. But Lucretius’ Kulturgeschichte stands as a very important model for Dido’s anguished reflection here because while it does emphasize the natural simplicity of life more ferarum it never idealises this primitive stage of life or proposes it as a viable life-style. Indeed, such a regressive idealisation is as foreign to Lucretius as any celebration of the wonders of teleological progress: it was surely no fun to live like beasts (and in the process be eaten alive by them), but modernity also has its far from negligible share of sorrows, all of them the direct product of the sort of cultural progress which has replaced wild beasts with cruel wars (5. 988-1010). Dido is not declaring an ideological allegiance to Epicurean precepts, but rather evoking the most distinctive and impressive account of early life on earth which Roman culture had produced. Epicurean and Lucretian undertones, however, can be detected in other sections of Book 4 (as already noted by Servius),72 and represent an important ideological contrappunto to the vaguely Stoic dominating ideology embodied by Aeneas (and Juppiter).73 Note, for instance, lines 54 sq.: his dictis impenso74 animum flammavit amore / spemque dedit dubiae menti solvitque pudorem. Impensus is a rare adjective which has its most relevant precedent in Lucretius’ reference to the impensa libido of early men (5. 964), leading to sexual unions uncomplicated by cultural superstructures.75 Anna had already echoed Lucretius in the same speech, as she tried to persuade Dido that she should not neglect dulcis natos Veneris nec praemia: both dulces (...) editior caedebat ut in grege taurus. 71 In an ‘objective and anthropological’ fashion (Brown ad loc.). 72 Cf. e.g. Serv. ad 4. 379: nam modo secundum Epicureos ait ea cura quietos. 73 Further indications and bibliography in Dyson (1996), p. 204. 74 Manuscripts are split between impenso and incensum, the former printed by Buscaroli, Geymonat and Mynors, the latter (a banalization probably suggested by flammavit) by Pease and Austin. 75 The echo of Lucretius’ inveterascit alendo (4. 1068) at Aen. 1. 713 (ardescitque tuendo) had signalled early on that Dido’s love for Aeneas was characterised as a (fatal) Epicurean passion: Dyson (1996), pp. 209-212, with further examples.

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nati and praemia vitae figure in Lucretius’ tirade against an excessive attachment to life at the end of Book 3 (895, 899).76 It is worth noting that all the Lucretian echoes in Anna’s speech derive from contexts where the concepts expressed are criticised as excessively unrestrained or hedonistic even by Epicurean standards, thus lending solvit (...) pudorem (4. 55) a distinctly negative overtone. As Dido follows Anna’s advice and yields to passion, ‘cultural’ time comes to a halt: non coeptae adsurgunt turres, non arma iuventus / exercet portusve aut propugnacula bello / tuta parant: pendent opera interrupta minaeque / murorum ingentes aequataque machina caelo (4. 86-89). In this suspended time there is space only for the (circular) reiteration of desire, for the regressive movement back into a ‘unidimensional time’ where “instinctual need and its gratification form a magically inseparable unit”77: note the repetition of iterum at 78 sq. – and the obsessive contemplation, even in absentia, of the beloved (83: illum absens absentem auditque videtque).78 Virgil had already offered his own take on the intrinsic limitations of a life conducted more ferarum in Book 3, when Achaemenides is thrown back into a primitive state of life on the island of the Cyclopes (3. 645-48): tertia iam lunae se cornua lumine complent cum vitam in silvis inter deserta ferarum lustra domosque traho vastosque ab rupe Cyclopas prospicio sonitumque pedum vocemque tremesco.

The Lucretian intertext is again evident in vitam (...) inter deserta ferarum / lustra (...) traho, which harks back to vitam tractabant more ferarum (5. 932), but the fundamental thematic reference is to Homer’s description of the island of the Cyclops as a primitive enclave in Odyssey 9, a model which is also operative in the brief cultural tour which Evander offers to Aeneas in Aeneid 8.79 Achaemenides’ life is clearly described as a nightmarish regression to primitivism: he is as terrified by the wandering Cyclopes as Lucretius’ early men were of roaming wild beasts (5. 990-93). Rescue from life among undeveloped monsters comes from exploiting Achaemenides’ Homeric knowledge and quickly retracing one’s own steps back into civilization: talia monstrabat relegens errata retrorsus / litora Achaemenides, comes infelicis Ulixi (3. 690 sq.). Further dangers await the Trojans as they arrive at their next stop, Carthage, since they do not know whether the land is inhabited, or, as it appears, wild and potentially hostile. Aeneas reconnoitres at night, keen to explore the new sites and find out whether men or wild beasts rule them: qui teneant (nam inculta videt), hominesve fer76

Foster (1971-72), who also connects optima Dido at Aen. 4. 291 with Lucr. 3. 893 sq. Sabbadini (1989), p. 308. 78 But Dido’s renunciation of love, as formulated at 18 sq., also appeared to Anna as an unacceptable rejection of the forward movement of time: solane perpetua maerens carpere iuventa? (4. 32). 79 On this episode see most recently Gildenhard (2004). 77

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aene / quaerere constituit sociisque exacta referre (1. 308 sq.). His uncertainty is both practical and symbolic, for the lack of any visible trace of human civilization warns about the potential hostility of the land and its people. As it turns out, Carthage will display all the markings of a civilized urban culture, even as a dark core of primitive, chthonic aggression can arguably be seen to persist, as I have argued before, in some of Dido’s feelings. The expression inter deserta ferarum occurs once more in the poem, at 7. 404: talem inter silvas, inter deserta ferarum / reginam Allecto stimulis agit undique Bacchi. Amata is taken over by Allecto, and runs wild in silvas (7. 385), with a clear objective in mind: maius adorta nefas maioremque orsa furorem / evolat et natam frondosis montibus abdit, / quo thalamum eripiat Teucris taedasque moretur (7. 386-88). In this instance the flight to the wild countryside under the stimulus of Bacchus represents yet another topographical projection of a regressive movement, away from the demands of historical necessity. Dionysiac enthusiasm embodies the force of Amata’s anti-historical drive, which finds expression in her attempt to create morae, that is to stop, if not quite to reverse, the moving forward of time. (The juxtaposition between eripiat and moretur reflects the oscillation between a desire to slow down the course of action envisaged by Fate, and a desire to prevent it altogether). Amata’s plan to create delays on the path of History (in this case, truly, history) aligns her with Juno, the explicit champion of morae, and of course with Dido. Juno had been explicit: flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo. / non dabitur regnis, esto, prohibere Latinis, / atque immota manet fatis Lavinia coniunx: / at trahere atque moras tantis licet addere rebus, / at licet amborum populos exscindere regum (7. 312-316). Anna had been equally clear in her instructions to Dido: tu modo posce deos veniam, sacrisque litatis / indulge hospitio, causasque innecte morandi, / dum pelago desaevit hiems aquosus Orion, / quassataeque rates, dum non tractabile caelum (4. 50-53). Juno’s programmatic statement is particularly important because of the direct role she envisages for the forces of the Underworld in the creation of morae, a role which is evident not just on the present occasion, when Allecto is asked to intervene, but could already be discerned in the first crucial delay she had managed to cause in Aeneas’ path. The storm at the beginning of Book 1 is described as the emergence of dark forces – luctantis ventos tempestatesque sonoras (1. 53) – unleashed against Aeneas at Juno’s request (1. 60-63), but normally kept under strict control (1. 54) in dark caves (1. 60 speluncis [...] atris) lest they disrupt the normal workings of nature.80 Lucretius describes the same forces (winds) as roaring like wild animals as they 80

See Hardie (1989), pp. 90-97, esp. p. 93 for the connection between the description of the enclosed winds at Aen. 1. 50-63 and the personification of Furor at 1. 294-96.

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enter the speluncae created by thick clouds (6. 194-98):81 tum poteris magnas moles cognoscere eorum [sc. clouds] speluncasque velut saxis pendentibu’ structas cernere, quas venti cum tempestate coorta complerunt, magno indignantur murmure clausi nubibus in caveisque ferarum more minantur.

Instinctual drives, repressed forces normally kept under control, are the main obstacles in the path to realising Juppiter’s and the Fate’s plan, which are all predicated on a linear motion forward in time and space, on the separatedness of events and their clear causal concatenation. A primordial atmosphere also constitutes the setting of Dido’s union with Aeneas (4. 160-166): interea magno misceri murmure caelum82 incipit, insequitur commixta grandine nimbus, et Tyrii comites passim et Troiana iuventus Dardaniusque nepos Veneris diversa per agros tecta metu petiere; ruunt de montibus amnes. speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem deveniunt.

This description is shot through, at one level, with some obvious characteristics of primitive life, first of all the use of caves as shelters and homes. Tecta at 160 recalls the saxea tecta inhabited by the durum genus of primitive men in Lucretius’ account of early life on earth (5. 984). These men nemora atque cavos montis silvasque tenebant / et frutices inter condebant squalida membra / verbera ventorum vitare imbrisque coacti (5. 955-57). The scattering of the hunting party (diversa [...] tecta), too, recalls a typical feature of the pre-social arrangements prevailing at that time, as Evander will point out in his own Kulturentstehungslehre in Aeneid 8: is genus indocile ac dispersum montibus altis / composuit legesque dedit (sc. Saturnus). Note also the occurrence in both contexts of the clausula per agros, at Lucr. 5. 973 and Aen. 4. 163. As Aeneas and Dido move further away from the civilized urban world of Carthage they take a definite step back in time, towards a Lucretian spelunca and invia lustra (4. 151) which are more suitable for ferae (...) caprae (4. 152) than for humans. In this setting their conubia effectively represent an instance of the early mating patterns described by Lucretius – Venus in silvis iungebat corpora amantum (5. 962) –,83 a statement overdetermined here both because ‘Venus’ is as referential 81

The Lucretian model of Aen. 1. 60-63 is emphasized by the antiphrastic mention of foedere certo at 1. 62. 82 Hardie (1989), p. 318, n. 43 rightly connects this line with 1. 124. 83 Venus plays a role in the mating of animals (incidentally called conubia) also at 3. 776: conubia ad Veneris partusque ferarum. ‘Proper’ human marriage does not begin until a later

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as Lucretius’ is metaphorical, and because a union of bodies is, in fact, all that according to Aeneas and Venus (as opposed to Dido and Juno) is taking place: nec coniugis umquam / praetendi taedas aut haec in foedera veni (4. 338 sq.). The contrast in terminology between the various fashions in which matrimonial unions are referred to in the book is undoubtedly significant. Dido talks of thalami at 4. 18 and 4. 550, a word carefully eschewed by the narrator’s voice at 160-172. Both Dido at 4. 18 and Aeneas at 4. 339 mention taedae as a crucial ingredient for a ‘proper’ wedding, replaced in the cave by unspecified, and culturally invalid ignes (4. 167). In the primeval setting of their union there can be no place for foedera,84 only for instinctual drives which in this case are set in motion by scheming gods, and which each participant in the ceremony experiences and interprets as he or she deems fit. The cultural ambiguity of the ‘ceremony’ and the irreconciliable interpretations it allows in Dido and Aeneas will be the cause of future tragedy.85 At the same time, the union in the cave acquires a cosmic significance through the involvement of all the four creative elements: Venus – with the assistance of Juno – presides over a fusion of elements which recalls her role in the proem of Lucretius’ De rerum natura.86 Indeed, the setting in which Aeneas and Dido move is reminiscent not just of primitive life on earth, but, even more remotely, of the early stages of the existence of the cosmos just emerging from Chaos, where water fire and air fight for predominance and natural order has not yet prevailed.87 As their hunting mates disappear, Aeneas and Dido, alone in the flooded woods, walk in Deucalion’s and Pyrrha’s footsteps as the begetters of the human race. The difference, in this case, is that there is no univocal divine sanction for this alternative pattern of evolution: the primitive setting of the cave is but a temporary illusion, a fleeting image of regression to an unregulated age of desire and a-social and a-historical immediacy of satisfaction which Virgil’s narrative immediately impugns. Culture swiftly reasserts its rights, first in the rigid technical distinction formulated at line 172, and then through the intervention of Fama, a cultural entity which brings us back to the civilized, fully urban world we have momentarily (and illusorily) escaped: Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes (173). 5. Dido believes that in a world before History, before Time as the organizing vector of human development, she would not have been subjected to the contrastage, see 5. 1012 sq. 84 Cf. Lucr. 5. 958 sq.: nec commune bonum poterant spectare neque ullis / moribus inter se scibant nec legibus uti, and Aen. 8. 316: neque mos nec cultus erat. 85 A very balanced discussion in Williams (1968), pp. 377-387. 86 Cosmogonic imagery (with an Empedoclean flavour) is operative in Lucretius’ account of early mating on earth, which is brought about by Venus: see 5. 962 sq. and 1012 sq., with Campbell (2003), pp. 224 and 265. 87 Ovid’s return of Chaos in Book 1 of the Metamorphoses shows the connection between moral disorder and Chaos.

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dictory demands of desire and duty, to the inescapable requests of Jovian teleology. The curae of primitive men are of a very basic and practical nature, effectively confined to the need to survive the innumerable dangers surrounding them, as Lucretius explicitly points out (5. 982-87). Not for them to worry about the regularity of the sun’s movements (5. 973-81), nor about the psychological and legal complexities imposed by civilization upon the elementary satisfaction of sexual needs (5. 961-65). The sexual undertone of Dido’s words point in the same direction as the references to incest which we have seen before, for sexual licence is yet another powerful metaphor for a world organized not according to the rules of History and Logic, but those of Desire and Regression. Indeed, as anthropologists since Lévi-Strauss have taught us, the emergence of the incest taboo is crucial to the differentiation between nature and culture. But the clear evocation of Lucretian anthropology shows how intrinsically untenable this desire is. Virgil is constantly, if painfully aware that the emotional abandonment to the allure of regression is all-powerful precisely because it is impossible. Aeneas, after all, cannot embrace Andromache’s wistful theme-park, nor are we invited to regard Achaemenides’ return to a state of nature as anything but an unfortunate by-product of Homeric primitivism, against which Virgil unequivocally reasserts his afterness. Most graphically, unlike the immemores (3. 617) Greeks, he does take Achaemenides away with him, and together they retrace Ulixes’ steps from a safe distance.88 Primitive life has turned into a tourist attraction. The overcoming of mos ferarum can be read at three different levels: as a victory of self-control over instinctual drives; as a crucial stage in the progress of civilization; and then again as a self-conscious marker of literary posteriority and refinement. Conversely, its irresistible allure is that of unchecked desires, unconstrained life of nature, powerful literary models. In the dialectics of rejection of and regression to mos ferarum we can read not only an ambivalence in the face of any strong endorsement of a progressive vector of history and civilization (or, simply, of History tout court), but also, less expectedly, the potential elimination or at least a substantial downsizing of the option to see return to a primeval past as an effective alternative to the woes of the present and the future. This downsizing operates via the association of certain forms of the past with regression, feritas, and literary unrefinement.89 6. Aeneas himself, even if he does not endorse Andromache’s solution, is not immune to Dido’s own logic and her desire for chronological regression. Implicitly, when he is depicted as an oriental sovereign attending to his royal duties, all dressed up in foreign garb, forgetful of his own identity and mission (4. 259264). Explicitly, in his first and in many ways most chilling reply to Dido’s entreaties: me si fata meis paterentur ducere vitam / auspiciis et sponte mea com88

Lines 3. 690 sq., quoted above, p. 99. It will be evident that I have much sympathy for Jürgen Georges Schwindt’s approach to the notion temps caché (see his paper in this volume, esp. pp. 12 sq.). 89

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ponere curas (340 sq.) encourages readers (and Dido) to expect a consoling apodosis (“I would remain here with you”), but is followed by an unexpected desire for regression, for the repetition and restauration of the same Troy which has been destroyed (342-44: urbem Troianam primum dulcisque meorum / reliquias colerem, Priami tecta alta manerent, / et recidiva manu posuissem Pergama victis). In the world of his own impossible desires, Aeneas, too, would erase his forced departure from Troy and his eventual meeting with Dido: the movement towards a future different from the past is imposed by an external authority, a voice from without. Note, as a final example, the way in which Aeneas refers to his future at an early stage of his narrative to Dido, as he reports his farewell to Andromache: ‘vivite felices, quibus est fortuna peracta iam sua: nos alia ex aliis in fata vocamur. vobis parta quies: nullum maris aequor arandum, arva neque Ausoniae semper cedentia retro quaerenda’ (3. 493-97).

Roman culture and the Latin language represent the future as coming from the front of the subject90 and then moving to his back. Aeneas experiences a perverse inversion of this model – also suggested, perhaps, by the postponement of retro – in which the future recedes back from him even as he moves towards it. This is Tantalus’ torture all over again,91 of course, but it is also an intriguing collapsing of progression and regression. Aeneas must move to his future which is also his Ur-past, the antiqua mater which is more original, and potentially more regressive, than the mother Troy which he is originally inclined to pursue. 7. Dido displays more than once a powerful drive to question the unilinear progression of time, especially as she expresses strongly felt counterfactual desires. As her story unfolds towards its unhappy ending, Dido’s regret is, both specifically and generally, that events have not followed a different path of action. She wishes that Aeneas had never reached the shores of Carthage; or, at least, that she could have foreseen his betrayal, and taken early action to punish him, for instance by killing Ascanius. Dido’s rejection of time as the basic ordering principle of human and historical experience, and the indispensable vector of causality, aligns her with other literary characters whose Willensmacht is similarly directed.92 Nor is time the only target of her attacks. Under the force of her desires, a number of categorical distinctions collapse. Dido appears to be oblivious – unconsciously, but fundamentally – to a very basic need to differentiate and distinguish.93 Incestuous drives are an especially potent (and poignant) manifes90

Bettini (1986), p. 138. Cf. Sen., Th. 68: recedentes aquas. 92 Schiesaro (2003b), pp. 176-200, esp. pp. 208-214. 93 See Matte Blanco (1988) for the application of the terms ‘dividing mode’ and ‘indivisible mode’ to, respectively, asymmetrical and symmetrical logic. 91

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tation of this obliviousness, and Dido seems to experience them with peculiar intensity and variety, collapsing into one the distinct if comparable instincts of the most notorious paradigms of incest which mythology had to offer. Aeneas is at the same time Absyrtus to Dido’s Medea, Hippolytus to her Phaedra, Itys to her Procne, both brother and son. Beyond the erotic and sexual dimension of incest, the inability or unwillingness to compartimentalize reality into well-defined separate categories affects a wider spectrum of human activities, not just familial and affective relations, and fleshes out a more systematic challenge to a rational understanding of the external world. The obsession with sameness which underlies incest is in itself a projection of the unconscious’ own logic – which ignores (or repudiates) the elaborate set of differences and distinctions upon which ‘adult’ conscious logic94 – and, with it, social constructs – are based. Dido’s challenge to the ostensible ideology of the Aeneid is more radical than the specific alternative she posits to Aeneas’ itinerary. Hers would be a world without differences – between Trojans and Carthaginians (they would belong together in una urbs),95 between Rome and Carthage.96 Anna is herself a reflection or a double of Dido, obliquely credited – thanks to the fleeting evocation97 of alternative models98 – with the same passion for the Trojan leader which consumes Dido. Early on in the book she is labelled unanima (4. 8), a rare word which had already featured only in Plautus’ glorious take on symmetrical logic at Stichus 731 (ego tu sum, tu es ego; unianimi sumus),99 and will resurface later on the lips of Seneca’s Oedipus as he addresses Iocasta in the crucial questions-andanswers session which will reveal his guilt – he calls her (ominously) unanima coniunx (773).100 In Dido’s eyes, Ascanius, too, is both adopted son and attractive mirror of her lover. Her death is but a return to Sychaeus, a projection of the past into a future where newly-found conjugal bliss101 will magically elide the torments caused by Aeneas, thus realising the counterfactual desire of dying Dido: felix, heu nimium felix, si litora tantum / numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae (4. 657 sq.). The closural, epitaphic positioning of Dido’s lines constitutes a much harsher and more comprehensive repudiation of reality than the regret voiced by Euripides’ nurse.102 94

I refer to a distinction first proposed by Matte Blanco (1975). See above, p. 87. 96 Juno is the other exponent of this ‘ideology’: cf. Schiesaro (2003a), pp. xix-xxi. I return to this issue in Schiesaro (forthcoming). 97 Cf. 4. 421-23: solam nam perfidus ille / te colere, arcanos etiam tibi credere sensus; / sola viri mollis aditus et tempora noras. 98 As reported by Varro: D'Anna (1989), pp. 159-196. 99 See also 732 sq. 100 With, of course, a telling reversal of irony. Other interesting instances can be found in Catullus, 9. 4, 30. 1, and esp. 66. 80. 101 Cf. 6. 472-74: tandem corripuit sese atque inimica refugit / in nemus umbriferum, coniunx ubi pristinus illi / respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem (note the regressive overtones of corripuit sese). 102 Indeed, Anna’s words at 4. 45 sq. appear as a pointed reversal of the Eurpidean motif: note 95

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Unlike in the real world where she was tragically unable to resist Aeneas, in this new, eternal perspective she can squarely ignore him – de facto refusing to acknowledge his very presence – and can return to a status quo prior to the entire narrative of her life and Aeneas: prior to Sychaeus’ assassination, the search for a new home for her people, the Trojans’ parallel wanderings and their arrival at Carthage. Now, in this postumous take on the events narrated in Books 1 and 4, we realise the true import of Dido’s desire – a denial of time and of history, a sublimation of personal suffering not into eschatology, but timelessness. Ultimately, a world constructed according to Dido’s desires and projections would be a world without history, if history is – in the poem’s teleological drive – a process of transformation and increased differentiation, a world where Troy, Carthage and Rome are well-defined, mutually incompatible entities which not only cannot be collapsed together, but whose very opposition defines each other’s self-perception. A world, of course, where events do occur and cannot be undone, pace the unconscious’ constant desire to prove the contrary.103 Dido’s nostalgia for the impossible is at the root of an unsurpassed emotional and poetic appeal which goes well beyond romantic sympathy for a deceived love heroine. She gives voice to a radically alternative world-view, dominated by instinctual drives which stubbornly refuse to accept the dictates of logos and history. The emergence in the texture of Book 4 of unconscious desires and thought patterns, an obscure web of aggression, incest, and revenge, is not just the most authentically tragic dimension of the story. It also widens the challenge Dido thus comes to personify, as it deconstructs and forces us to reformulate some familiar dichotomies. Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents offers an interesting theoretical model for the emotional appeal Dido embodies. His reflections on the analogy between the process of civilization and the libidinal evolution of the individual, which see civilization as built on the denial of instincts, are a powerful reminder of the conflicts, contradictions and self-denials which underpin our abandonment of a state of nature. Dido’s attempt to combine her love for Aeneas, celebrated in the primeval setting of the cave, with the restrictions and demands of her role as the civilized ruler of her people, inevitably leads to disaster, dissolution, death. As Freud will remark in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, a drive to create constantly coexists, in human life, with a drive to destroy: “starting from speculations about the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I reached the conclusion that, in addition to the drive to preserve the living substance and bring it together in even large units, there must be another, opposed to it, which sought to break down these units and restore them to their primordial inorganic state”.104 Dido’s ‘breaking down of units’ takes the form of a regression to the that line 458 will echo the phonic texture of line 46. 103 I deal with this type of obsession in two protagonists of Senecan drama, Medea and Atreus: see Schiesaro (2003b), esp. pp. 210 sq. 104 Freud (1929/30 = 2002), p. 55.

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fluidity of oceanic feelings,105 indistinctiveness, timelessness. Her anguished non licuit will be echoed, two thousand years later, in Freud’s equally tragic regret which stands as an epigraph to this paper.

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It is interesting to develop in this connection an analysis of the repeated association of Dido’s emotions with the fluidity of the sea; it is not only in keeping with the marine setting of the story, but, more significantly, points to the indeterminate, oceanic feelings which obscure differences. Seneca offers a powerful image for this phenomenon in his Medea: bene dissaepti foedera mundi / traxit in unum Thessala pinus (335 sq.). Cf. Schiesaro (forthcoming).

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