Page 21 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

icy Dido in the mourning plains. Aeneas’ tender act reveals a letting go 3⁄4 in love, with love, for love, with inward tears 3⁄4 of his two beloved Dido and
Pallas. These garments are not the treachery and love-poison robes of Helen, Medea or Deianeira. Embroidered with the thin, fine, golden threads of life, of love, of hospitality poured from the depths of Dido’s rushing golden rivers: their nuggets melted, spun, woven by her “happy-in-her work” hands into mesmerizing Acanthus flowers, petals from love to beloved. En-soul-ments. Whatever deficiencies in Aeneas’ drive and speech, his un-silences and silences are just as, if not more powerful, than Dido’s. He endures. “So heavy a task to found the Roman Race,” (I,33) says Virgil. Just as heavy, as Anthony and Cleopatra’s.
Spence’s and Farron’s historic, tragic-romantic readings obscure Horsfall’s futile, though erudite, historicism. While Spence and Farron agree that Dido- Carthaginian and Aeneas-Roman personifications, trenched in Rome’s atrocity- laden national memory, favour Dido, Horsfall asserts Romans shun Dido. He claims that Carthage’s renowned ferocity, Dido’s threat to Aeneas’ heroic Roman quest, her magical conjurations and her dubious historical portrayal must have appalled, if not made readers, at least, suspicious. However, Trojans can also arouse suspicion to Romans of acute sensibility.
Double-tongued Venus fears the “treachery of Carthage” and “the double- tongued people of Tyre” (I, 665). What paradox for the baker of Trojan double- dealing! In the Iliad, she is Paris’ chef. Venus serves him tasty Helen. Aeneas, like Paris’ slap to Menelaus, slaps Dido’s hospitality. In the Aeneid, she uses Cupid to duplicate Ascanius’ image. It is Cupid-Ascanius who inflames Dido’s
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