No other Roman heroine resembles more clearly a protagonist of tragedy than does the Dido of the Aeneid. Since the time of Servius her tragic pedigree has been acknowledged and analyzed. She is at once a Medea, an Ajax, a Phaedra, and a Deianira. Book 4 has been examined in terms of dramatic structure (Quinn 1968) or Aristotelian notions of tragic characterization (Moles 1984); it has also been viewed as a lens for focusing the construction of a Roman civic identity (Panoussi 2002). Here I shall consider Dido’s actions and ultimate death in light of Euripides’ Alcestis, and in particular the notions of substitution and exchange operative therein. After briefly discussing the textual links between Euripides’ Aicestis and the Dido episode in the Aeneid, I argue that the connection of the two tragic heroines legitimizes Dido’s claim to be a wife to Aeneas and underscores the fact that her death occurs in exchange, as it were, for Aeneas’ (and Rome’s) ultimate survival and prosperity. At the same time, Dido’s public persona, like that of Alcestis, depicts woman as subject and agent. Both Dido and Alcestis, however, ultimately control only their own death and both make a ‘‘return’’ that silences and objectifies them. Yet despite their objectification they also represent a model of superior moral behavior, whose loss is not without consequences for the patriarchal order that required their death.
The connection of Euripides’ Alcestis and Dido is forged in the very last scene of book 4, when Iris, at the request of Juno, descends from Olympus to collect a lock of hair from the dying queen:
Then almighty Juno, taking pity on her long suffering
And her difficult death, sent Iris from Olympus
To release her struggling spirit from the bondage of her limbs;
For since she was dying neither a death deserved by fate nor natural,
But wretched before her time and burning by sudden rage,
Proserpina had not yet cut the blond lock from her head and had not sent her to Stygian Orcus.
Therefore dewy Iris flew down with her saffron wings, trailing through the sky a thousand different colors against the light of the sun, and stood over her head. ‘‘I was bid to take to Dis this sacred lock and release you from this body.”
Thus she spoke and cut the lock, and at once all warmth melted away and her life vanished in the winds.
(693-705; except where noted, all translations are my own)
Both Servius (on Aeneid 3.46) and Macrobius (Saturnalia 5.19.2) note that these lines look back to the words of Thanatos in Euripides’ Alcestis, who explains that he has come to take Alcestis’ life:3
The woman is going down in any case to the house of Hades. I go to her to take the first sacrificial cutting of her hair. For when this sword has consecrated the hair of someone’s head, he is the sacred property of the gods below. (73-76; trans. Kovacs 1994-2004)
The Vergilian text appropriates Thanatos’ sacrificial vocabulary and thus links the two heroines at the moment of their death. There is a certain antithetical symmetry in their connection: whereas Thanatos appears at the beginning of the Greek play, Iris cuts Dido’s lock of hair at the very end of Aeneid 4. Both scenes carry connotations of ritual sacrifice (although Dido’s death is a suicide that occurs as the climax of a magic ritual). There are also obvious differences: Alcestis is the paradigm of the loyal wife, while Dido’s ‘‘marriage’’ to Aeneas is a subject of debate; Alcestis dies to save her husband’s life, while Dido repeatedly curses Aeneas and openly wishes for his death (612-20).
Yet on closer scrutiny, the linking of Dido to Alcestis at the end of book 4 may prove not all that coincidental. As we reflect on the portrayal of the Carthaginian queen in light of her shared final moment with Alcestis, other connections become possible, connections that may illuminate Dido as a subject and a model leader. Both women emerge as powerful matriarchs, whose domestic affairs affect the prosperity of their city. As they face their death, they both address their marriage bed and revisit their life-choices. In both cases, their final moments reveal that they view their public and private lives as inextricably linked.
Alcestis’ farewell to her marriage bed has parallels to Deianira’s similar scene in Sophocles’ Women ofTrachis (900-935). Yet Alcestis differs from Deianira in that, as she bids her children farewell, she moves from the private to the public realm and establishes her authority as a matriarch and head of her household. In a perceptive analysis of the drama, Wohl demonstrates that Alcestis transforms her private bedchamber into the administrative center of the oikos (Wohl 1998, 133-42). After privately bidding farewell to her marital bed (177-86), Alcestis gradually expands the domestic space to encompass first her children (189-91) and then her slaves (192-95). Alcestis’ last exchange with Admetus establishes her authority and subjectivity, as she is the one to set the terms for the oikos even after her death. Admetus’ ready acceptance of these terms confirms not only that Alcestis saves the oikos but also that the oikos that survives is hers rather than Admetus’ (Wohl 1998, 137). As a result, her domestic and maternal authority are linked with political authority (Wohl 1998, 142). Her final words suggest her separateness from Admetus and self-determination in her choice to die. Admetus’ helplessness in the face of her death implies that she is a model of authority that he cannot hope to match (Wohl 1998, 138-44).
At the moment of Dido’s death, we witness the same conflation of domestic and public space:
There, when she saw the Trojan clothes and the familiar bed, a little hesitant by tears and thoughts, she fell upon her bed and spoke words most strange:
‘‘sweet remains, while fate and god allowed, accept my soul and release me from these cares.
I have lived and finished the course that fortune had given me and now a great image of what I was will go to the earth below.
I have founded a glorious city, I have seen my own walls,
I have taken revenge for my husband from my brother who’s my foe.’’ (4.648-56)
The interiority of Dido’s chambers does not stop her from making public statements. Her final words are of her accomplishments as a leader and a queen, a founder of a glorious city (655) and an avenger of wrongs (656). Although her suicide takes place inside the palace, its effects quickly ripple through the city, prefiguring its eventual destruction (669-71, 682-83). As in the case of Alcestis, Dido’s domestic and political authority are inextricably linked: her failure to preserve her marriage is also a failure to save her city.
The connection of Dido with Alcestis, the loyal wife par excellence, prompts a new look at Dido’s marital status. The narrative makes clear that the supernatural wedding scene in the cave leaves each participant with a different perception of their bond. Dido considers herself married, while Aeneas explicitly denies it (338-39). Yet throughout book 4 he has shared her kingdom (259-61) as well as her bed (648). The link between Dido and Alcestis may lead readers to reevaluate the bond between Aeneas and Dido. Since Alcestis is the ideal wife whose defining characteristic is loyalty to her husband, her juxtaposition with Dido also sheds light on the problem of her identity as Aeneas’ wife. To be sure, Dido is akin to a number of other tragic wives, such as Medea. Yet in that case, the point is to highlight Dido’s persona as a dangerous foreigner. Through her association with Alcestis, Dido is cast as the loving and loyal wife and is thus implicitly justified in her perception of herself as married to Aeneas.
The tragic notions of substitution and exchange that define the plot of Alcestis are also operative in the Aeneid. Although Dido’s death may doom her city, it ensures the birth of another. Through her death she saves, as it were, Aeneas for Rome. The notions of substitution and exchange at work may also help explain the ritual, and more specifically, the sacrificial elements that figure in the description of Dido’s death.4 Iris’ cutting of Dido’s hair replicates the cutting of the victim’s hair before a sacrifice. As noted above, Dido’s death also symbolically stands for the death of Carthage, the city that threatened the very existence of Rome. The text renders this symbolic link explicit when at the moment of Dido’s death the women’s lamentations are compared to those that would accompany the fall of Carthage (669-71). Yet Dido, like Alcestis, resists the objectification that this exchange imposes on her. By taking their fate into their own hands, both women assert their subjectivity. Both highly successful matriarchs, they face their death with determination and bravery, and present a model of leadership for the men. At the same time, their loss, with its devastating consequences for the people around them, serves as an implicit critique of the order that dictated their destruction.
Both Dido and Alcestis return after their death, but they no longer speak. Whereas Alcestis is literally brought back from Hades by Heracles, Dido ‘‘returns’’ in the narrative when Aeneas encounters her in the underworld (Aeneid 6.450-76). To be sure, Dido’s silence most obviously mirrors Ajax’s angry reaction to Odysseus’ presence in the underworld in Odyssey 11.543-67. The scene ends with Dido turning her back on Aeneas to follow her first husband, Sychaeus, thus implying her complete severance from the Trojan hero. Although she died a leader of a city, she returns as a wife, an imago of her former self (654). In Euripides’ Alcestis too the final exchange replaces Alcestis with herself, but this new woman does not quite possess Alcestis’ original subjectivity (Wohl 1998, 174). Both women are thus ultimately objectified, their silence signifying an otherness that both tragedy and the Aeneid finally suppress. At the same time, however, this otherness, expressed with stark poignancy, constitutes a form of both resistance and reproach. In the Aeneid, as in Euripides, the dead woman returns incorporated within the new order the poem celebrates. Dido’s ultimate silence evokes another silent heroine, Lavinia. In a symbolic way, when it comes to model wives, Dido is exchanged with Lavinia, whose silence throughout the epic is emblematic of neutralized otherness.
World History
