Page 20 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

is leaving, before wicked Rumour makes it to her ears: a Pygmalean flash-back.39 Pygmaleon deceives Dido with empty hopes (mission of Sychaeus), just as Polymestor deceives Hecuba (slaying of Polydorus), just as Aeneas deceives her with empty marriage. Yet despite these emotional red flags, Aeneas suffers more toils, trials, misfortunes and afflictions that Dido because his piece-meal, riddling oracular destiny is never spoon-fed at once. Farron also minimizes Aeneas’ seizing terror, anger at his departures. In Troy’s last moments, he feels rage and despair; in Carthage’s last hours, he wrestles and agonizes to control his emotions.
Torn Aeneas “feels the pain deep in his mighty heart, but his mind remained unmoved and the tears rolled in vain” (IV, 448). Aeneas also explicitly tells Dido that though “his first concern is to tend the city of Troy” (IV, 340), inferring not Rome (Troy can be settled anywhere), “it is not his will that drives him to Italy” (IV, 360)40 a sentiment he, after swearing to the gods, fervently reiterates to Dido: “it was against my will, O queen, that I left your shores” (VI, 465). Similarly, when Pallas dies, Aeneas’ breast quakes with revengeful fury. But perhaps the most moving scene is when loving Aeneas wraps Dido’s twin gift-tunics around Pallas’ corpse. Farron dismisses and tints Aeneas’ generosity with dark, uncaring strokes. He rushes to discredit Austin’s emotional insight that, precisely at this point, Aeneas feels in his heart the emotional cost of his Italian enterprise. Farron ignores that Aeneas has held and carried these beloved twin garments through the thick and thin of Books I to XI; he could have easily hurled them into the vortex of oblivion after departing Carthage or after meeting
39 “What am I waiting for? For my brother Pygmalion to come and raze my city to the ground?” (IV, 325). 40 [Could Virgil be suggesting his own loss of interest with the Roman-Augustan enterprise? He wants his book burned.]
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