Page 19 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

Does Aeneas tiptoe?
Both critics fail to stress Aeneas’ silent struggle and in-kept sorrow. His silence and un-silence are just as powerful as Spence’s Dido’s. Aeneas, facing war trauma and loss, is penniless, is forced into exile, is never-near his promised land, is mistrusting of women, is given piece-meal oracles and struggles with his emotions at every loss. Farron also misinterprets Aeneas’ wrapping of Pallas’ corpse with Dido’s twin tunics. Aeneas has lost his Troy, Creusa and Anchises. He is fatigued. Discouraged. Think of war-torn Iraq or Afghanistan, etc. It is true that both exiles lost spouses, but Aeneas’ losses are greater: he experiences the atrocities of a burning Troy and ache of father’s loss an experience that Dido doesn’t share in Tyre. Moreover, Dido buys her way out of her misery: she has Sychaeus’ cash stashed in underground bank and purchases oxhide-length acreage. She chooses exile while Aeneas is forced into exile. It is true that both are accidental leaders and that Dido suffers Venus’ affliction while Aeneas suffers Juno’s wrath: but Aeneas’ land is never near. Unlike the heroes of the Iliad, he is driven by call of duty: he has to reach Ausonia and Lavinia just as Odysseus has to reach Ithaca and Penelope. Though Aeneas has reason to mistrust women (Venus, as Otreus’ daughter, deceives Anchises; Venus disguises herself as Diana to Aeneas; Helen is the cause of Troy’s fall), he, like Odysseus 7-year rendezvous with Calypso’s38 charming lures, allows himself to be with Dido for a winter. Similarly, Dido has also reason to be on men-alert. “Afraid where there was nothing to fear,” (IV,295) she intuitively perceives that Aeneas
38 Though Calypso “keeps the grieving, unhappy man with her...and keeps on charming him with soft and flattering words to make him forget Ithaca.”
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