Page 11 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

silence is perplexing and needs elucidation. Similarly, Farron’s snapshot of Aeneas’ weaknesses and tiptoeing lacks Helios’ luminosity. And Horsfall’s neglects to see that Trojan duplicity can also arouse Roman-reader alert. Timeline aside, we commiserate with tragic heroines and heroes because they mirror our existential struggles, our tragic-poetic being, our multiplicities. Dido, Diana, Hecate.
Aeneas and Aeneas’ effigy.
Spence’s triple face. Spence’s rhetorical-psychological-historical criticism argues that Dido’s tragic pietas-furor-silence speech-shifts and Carthaginian personification exert textual-ethical and socio-political authority arousing reader identification with her. Dido’s compelling poetics shift from logos to pathos to silence 3⁄4 from wall erections to Cupid’s flame (Book I); from impotence to suicide (Book IV); from martyrdom to tartarean s i l e n c e (Book VI) 3⁄4 splash and raid, squeezing, shattering other voices to zoom on Dido’s tragic love, guilt and shame rather than on Aeneas’ trials, flaws and pietas. She adds that Cairns, Quinn and Otis view Dido as an afflicted Queen (Cairns) whose rectitude and rationality flees to Mt. Cythaeron’s paradise, gets a high before lethally falling from its precipice (Quinn), becoming the antithesis of Aeneas’ piety: an anomie (Otis). Perkell, Monti and Spence differ. They tear, peel, excoriate Aeneas’ humanity (Perkell) and hurl his remains from the pillar of pietas (Monti) to the minotaur’s labyrinth where moral superiority and pietas dim (Spence). Spence, with tweezers and magnifying glass, dissects tragic and allusive tropes: the tragedy of Dido’s fall from Aeneas’ precipice toes the Aristotelian poetic rope. It has the frightful, pitiful, cathartic din of hamartia (hammer: flaw), peripeteia
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