Page 14 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

Horsfall’s uniface. Horsfall’s historicism argues that Roman readers shun Dido due to Carthage’s ferocity, her Roman threat, her magical conjurations, her Punic War link, and her ambiguous historical portrayal. Vulnerable Carthage is no gracious host. Though the Jupiter-Mercury team rush to secure hospitality for drifting Trojans long before Ilioneus’ unwelcoming ship-burning scare, Dido remains cautious. Horsfall doubts whether Dido’s fake-polite offer “to share her kingdom” buys her Roman sympathies. Moreover, Dido’s chthonic-cuffs (lust, marriage {?}, Aeneas’ obsession with the building of Carthage) and Juno’s divine-cuffs (tempests, marriage {?}, ship burning, war stirrings) threaten Aeneas’ Julian-Augustan quest. Similarly, Horsfall doubts whether Dido’s Massylian hermetic conjurations can charm magic-condemning Romans. He also doubts whether Junian Carthage can truly commiserate with Trojan vicissitudes. Dido’s suspicious Teucrian acumen of Troy’s misfortunes and her Junian temple, Trojan-corpse-art, except for Aeneas, Memnon and Penthesilea, cheer Dardanian atrocities.22
Horsfall’s pre-and-post-Virgilian historical research shows historical-mythical extrapolations while Navius’ fragments paint an unfavourable image of Dido. In Macrobius’ Epigram of Planudean, Dido and Aeneas never meet. Dido’s own slaying with sword is to flee marriage to King Iarbas.23 Timaeus has Dido kill herself during her African exile. In Naevius’ Bellum Punicum 2 fragment 23,24 hints to a conversation between Dido and Aeneas are tone-traced. Nuances, in
22 Horsfall says that representations of Diomedes’ King Rhesus-slaughter, of Achilles’ ambush and murder of Priam’s son, Troilus22, of the Trojan women’s thwarted supplication to Athena, of Achilles’ tow of Hector’s remains around Patroclus’ tomb and of Priam’s begging for Hector’s body. Horsfall, 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).
23In Wikipedia, after Dido’s self-sacrifice, “Dido was deified and worshipped.” In this version, Carthage’s foundation occurred 72 years before the Rome’s. Wikipedia. Dido. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dido.
24 “blande et docte percontant Aenea quo pacto Troiam urbem liquisset?”
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