Page 12 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

(reversal) and agnorisis (recognition). It chills. Spence’s radar captures many inter-textual allusions10 3⁄4 Iliad, Little Iliad, Medea and Odyssey 3⁄4 and internal Oresteian and Penthean allusions related to furor and city. Spence’s minor historicism sees Dido’s “personification of Carthage” as a Roman reader- alert: as Carthage falls, Dido shall also fall. Spence concludes that neither logos nor imperium nor pietas nor sceptre speaks to us, only furor; only pathos has greater authority. Pathos is language’s thyrsus.
Farron’s triple face. Like Spence, Farron’s anti-Aeneas rhetorical-historical- romantic criticism defends, acclaims Dido: it stresses that Dido’s sublime, heartrending love-hate poetics, bewitching readers for two millennia, awakens our deepest empathies despite hostile Roman-Carthaginian allusions and our post-modern romantic sensibilities. Farron posits that Virgil’s measured musings stir readers to fado or wistful songs because Dido marches on magma while Aeneas’ tip toes.11 Farron also contends that Dido’s saturating and unforgettable repertoire of threnody, woe and torch song shows that her wrath and allegations, when contrasted to Aeneas’ defence, are more correct, precise.12 Similarly, Farron argues that un-keen Aeneas’ early Roman piety is light-days from Dido’s early Carthagolatrism13 and just as weak14 as his passion for Dido. Farron’s
10 Dido’s fall recalls Troy’s fall: just as Dido and Troy burn to nothingness, Aeneas escapes, runs away. As he escapes, he leaves behind his own Trojan horse of love simultaneously decimating Dido and razing Carthage. Virgil’s Dido and Apollonius’ Medea seem to be fated sisters: Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, after inflaming Medea’s heart, inflict an ill-omened marriage in the darkness of a cave.
11 Farron says that Dido’s heated struggle and lustre conquers, oppresses, sub-merges cool Aeneas’ toils. Aeneas exists, it seems, solely to show how his passage to Italian bloodlines decimates her.
12 Farron says that Aeneas’ restraint, knot, exasperates lectors 3⁄4 his speech, in Book 4, seems remote and evocative of controversia;12 in Book 6 we hear of his sweet love, of his harm-guilt of his tears of pity without one Aenean breath of emotional fire. Tongue-tied Aeneas dwells not in the Didonian pit of unrequited love, or of breast-tearing remorse or of jarring loss; rather he treks to the altar of duty, of destiny, of empire, and this, however, Farron adds, only after divine or external nagging.
13Dido – alliance – marriage.
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