Page 22 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

heart with passion’s fire and causes her to fall like Troy (I, 680). It is Cupid- Ascanius who takes the Trojan, Dionysian royal gifts to Dido. Yet these gifts, more revealing of Trojan treachery, have the potential to raise Trojan-alert and enlist fleeing anti-Dido patriots on Dido’s line. Why is Dido 3⁄4 androgyny 3⁄4 given Helen’s cloak, Ilione’s sceptre, a double-gold coronet and a necklace of pearls? Why is she naïve as to their symbolic meaning? Helen’s dress and cloak41 symbolizes adultery and destruction. Helen’s adultery parallels Dido’s adultery of univira; Helen-Paris threaten Troy just as Dido-Aeneas threaten Roman Troy. Similarly, Ilione’s sceptre symbolizes duty to kin, first and foremost. Just as Ilione42 renounces her son to save brother Polydorus, Aeneas’ renounces Dido to save Trojans. The double-gold coronet symbolizes duplicity: Pentheus (double sun, two cities of Thebes); double Aeneas (flesh-Aeneas and effigy Aeneas)43 foreshadow Dido’s pietas-furor angst and fall. The necklace of pearls, recalls Harmonia’s necklace, a symbol of seduction and bloodshed. Polyneices’ bribing of Eriphyle forces Amphiaraus to fight on the doomed Seven-Against-Thebes expedition. Less compelling, Aeneas seduces her with pearly lies that will bring her destruction: a marriage. All of these allusions, literary artefacts, would have triggered, flagged Trojan treachery to the sophisticated Roman-Greco reader.
41 Cloaks are potent symbols of adultery, affliction, destruction: Deianeira’s (love potion) and Medea’s cloaks (hatred).
42 Priam’s daughter and wife of Thracian Polymestor swaps brother Polydorus identity with her child’s. Greeks bribe Polymestor with Electra’s hand if he kills Polydorus, Polymestor, jumping at Greek-alliance, mistakenly kills his child. Ilione kills Polymestor for his treachery. Like Ilione, Aeneas’ loyalties are with his bloodline: Anchises and Ascanius. Hyginus (Fabula 109). See March, Jenny. Cassell Dictionary of Classical Mythology. UK: Cassell, 1998.
43 The Aeneid. (IV, 509),
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