Page 23 - GALIET Dido's Triplicity and Aeneas' Duplicity

Similarly, though Carthage’s savagery is known, and Rome’s hatred of Carthage is a fact, it need not infer that Romans hated Dido or perceived her as an infamous villain. Nor can we prove these sentiments with fragmentary, inconclusive evidence. Even if we were to suppose so, we would still feel pity for her honour-shame dilemmas. Dido, like Ajax,44 stabs herself because she has been shamed. Ajax’s “to nobly live or to nobly die” prevails. Similarly, Dido, within walls of Carthage, and Hektor, outside walls of Troy have no alternatives: both fear to be “a laughing stock” (IV, 535-Il. XXIV). Similarly, we don’t know if Romans would shun or favour her univira standards. But what we do know is that we commiserate with tragic heroines and heroes. We are born tragic- poetic beings, children of pathos and the ineffable logos first, and then beings in time. Spence and Farron concur that our sympathies are with Dido because she agonizes in speech and in tragic climax. Spence confirms that the Dido-Aeneas episode has all the excruciating misfortunes, anxieties, fears and pity of Dionysian tragedy. From a tragic perspective, both suffer, both struggle and feel the existential tension, conflict, contradiction between the real and the ideal (Solger), between universal justice and contingent and particular acts45 (Hegel), between the Apollonian and the Dionysian (Nietzsche), between their dreams and their destinies, between necessity and liberty (Schelling).
We commiserate with Aeneas and Dido, Antony and Cleopatra, Rama and Sita, King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson because they mirror our own tensions between physis and nomos and necessity and liberty. No matter what we choose, decisions cast if-shadows: Hamlet. Oedipus. Philoctetes. Hecuba.
44 Sophocles II. Ajax. Trans. Lattimore and Grene. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957.
45 Hegel says this conflict is resolved by re-establishing the universal in the particular. In other words, by erasing
our immediate individuality. Hegel. Phenomenology of Mind. Trans. by A.V. Miller. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977.
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