Page 10 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

Sarah Spence’s Varium et Mutabile5 and Steven Farron’s The Aneas Episode as an Attack on Aeneas’ Mission and Rome6 concur on a pro-Dido reading of the Aeneas-Dido episodes in The Aeneid7 based on their subjective airs. By contrast, N.M. Horsfall’s Dido in the Light of History8 presents an objective anti-Dido reading based on his erudite historicism, too distant from poetic mytho-magic and being. While Spence and Farron contrast Dido 3⁄4 a fuelled tragic heroine 3⁄4 with Aeneas 3⁄4 a pallid antipathic tragic hero, Horsfall zooms- in into the socio-cultural architecture of golden Rome. But must we submerge Dido and Aeneas to his hysterical, historical periscope, a la Greenblatt, and read that which is timeless in time? Ought we not digest Dali’s yummy Camembert clock? Or, without offence, enjoy his time-deconstruction?
Or else, must we hail Spence’s and Farron’s pro-Dido multi-poetic readings, spirit nerve-suckers and soothers, for elucidating on the poem’s in-and-of-itself meaning and, then, shamelessly deny “a rose is a rose is rose?”9 Though Spence’s and Farron’s arguments makes sense for the most part, Spence’s awe at Dido’s
5 Spence, S. “Varium et Mutabile: Voices of Authority in Aeneid 4,” in C. Perkell (ed.), Reading Vergil’s Aeneid, Norman (Okla.) 1999: 80-95.
6 Farron, S. “The Aeneas-Dido Episode as an Attack on Aeneas’ Mission and Rome,” Greece and Rome 27 (1980): 34-47. 7 Virgil. The Aeneid. Trans. David West. Penguin Books. London, UK 1991.
8Horsfall, N.M. “Dido in the Light of History,” in S.J. Harrsion (ed.), Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, Oxford 1990: 127-44 (orig. publ. 1973).
9 Stain, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Sacred Emily, a Poem. Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin Press, 1933.
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