Dido, The Tragic Queen of Carthage

The gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome are a vicious scurvy lot, whether one looks at them in Homer or Virgil. Take for instance Virgil’s tale of Dido, the tragic queen of Carthage. She has been widowed and she has dealt poorly with her grief, but while she is vulnerable it is really the actions of Venus that crushes utterly Dido’s spirit.

Remember that Virgil’s Venus is Aphrodite, the goddess of Love, and do not confuse this Venus with later conceptualizations that give us a heavenly Venus and her earthly wraith, Venus-on-earth. Virgil’s Venus is a schemer dreaming up new intrigues for the benefit of Aeneas, her son by Anchises the Dardanian commander. This is not a virgin birth; the ancient gods and goddesses are always coupling with the children of men and that is where the mighty men of old came from.(1) I know that this sounds like a soap opera but it is in Latin and after all it is a classic soap opera. (Have you noticed that soap and opera often in fact go together; take for instance Cavalleria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni, the featured piece in Godfather III. ) Virgil then reveals Venus’s scheme to deal with Dido whom she perceives as a threat to Aeneas.

. . . . . . . . . . . Altered in face and figure, Cupid
would go in place of captivating Ascanius(2)
using his gifts to fire the queen to madness,
weaving a lover’s ardour through her bones.(3)

Cupid, vicious lad and half-brother to Aeneas gladly fulfills his mission and Dido falls madly in love with Aeneas. The action reminds me of the testimony of St. Anthony of the Desert to the effect that wherever we have a weakness there the demons love to leap,(4)and Dido has weaknesses enough! On a hunting expedition Aeneas and Dido are driven by a storm that is induced by Venus and the goddess Juno,(5) and they take refuge in a cave. No cheap and tawdry description is offered, but we are given to understand that it is a tryst in which Dido surrenders all; but Aeneas promises less than she thinks.

Here Jupiter, the Greek god Zeus, stirs the pot and sends Mercury to instruct Aeneas to continue his appointed journey and Aeneas is impelled by Jupiter to leave Dido and continue his journey. Dido is left in rage and despair and commits suicides spreading as much guilt and grief around as she possibly can. Suicide is essentially a self-centered act even in its self-negation. Dido deceives her sister Anna asking her to build a pyre for a sacrifice, but little does Anna suspect that the intended victim is Dido herself. Anna cries out,

. . . . . Was it all for this, my sister?
You deceived me all along? Is this what your pyre
meant for me—this, your fires—this, your altars?
You deserted me—what shall I grieve for first?
Your friend, your sister, you scorn me now in death?(6)

Of the four loves in Christian tradition, affection, brotherly love, eros, and agapé, affection is disregarded, brotherly love is savaged, eros is warped and twisted from its true origin and cast back into the pagan traditions of the gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome, and agapé that highest self-giving Love is unknown.

What kind of goddess of Love is Venus? What kind of god of Love is fair Cupid?(7) The true God of Love in his earthly incarnation would point out, “By their fruits you shall know them.”(8) Their fruit is a most unsavoury ratatouille of lust, manipulation, and violence. Their fruit is destructive and evil, but Cupid lovely boy has had his fun and for him there is no negative payoff.

Despite the appearance of Venus, the goddess of Love, and Cupid, the god of Love, this tragic tale is not about love, even though the word is bandied about; rather the tale is about illicit desire and cathexis without love, although in this case it seems a bit one-sided. Dido lets down her boundaries; for Aeneas it’s little more than a one night stand. True love is rather different with its mutuality and tender surrenders leading to an intimacy in which both parties seek the other’s good.

And what my God, of Agapé, the highest love of which You are the embodiment, literally Love in the Flesh? In this we know love:

Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.(9)

This Love is the foundation and source of all other loves, and even where affection, brotherly love, and eros are twisted almost beyond recognition the lineamentum, the outline, the contour, the face of the God of Love, of Agapé, lies hidden. It is ultimately hidden Love that lends the sweet pang of lost Paradise that all other loves, bent, rent, broken, circle around.(8)


1 This is not unknown in Biblical tradition: Genesis 6:1-2; 4. ESV, “When man began to multiply on the face of the land and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose. . . . The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.”
2 Ascanius is also called Iulius, the son of Aeneas.
3 Virgil, The Aeneid, trans. Robert Fagles, (New York: Penguin, 2008), p. 69. I, 783-786.
4 St. Athanasius’s Life of Antony, filtered and edited by my memory.
5 Juno is the Greek goddess Hera, the wife of Zeus.
6 Virgil, p. 151, IV, 836-841
7 In pagan tradition Eros is the Greek name of Cupid, not a winged chubby boy, but a full grown wingéd “man”.
8 Matthew 7:16
9 1 John 4:8-11 ESV