So this one shone among her handmaidens, a virgin unwedded.īut right away she becomes Arete, the mother of Nausikaa and the wife of Alkinoos. Range in the wilds and play, and the heart of Leto is gladdened,įor the head and the brows of Artemis are above all the others,Īnd she is easily marked among them, though all are lovely, It was Nausikaa of the white arms who led in the dancing Īnd as Artemis, who showers arrows, moves on the mountainsĮither along Taygetos or on high-toweringĮrymanthos, delighting in boars and deer in their running,Īnd along with her the nymphs, daughters of Zeus of the aegis, They all threw off their veils for a game of ball, and among them So Dido seemed, in such delight she movedĬompare this description to the description of Nausikaa, as Homer portrays her when she is first observed by Odysseus:īut when she and her maids had taken their pleasure in eating, Slung on her shoulders, in her stride she seems On every hand the mountain nymphs appear, The queen paced toward the temple in her beauty, When we first meet her, she is Nausikaa, the daughter of Alkinoos, king of the Phaiakians. Dido undergoes transformations that align with this change in Aeneas. In the action at Carthage, Aeneas begins as a new Odysseus, but as the tale unfolds, he becomes a new Paris. We must first recognize that both Aeneas and Dido simulate all at once many characters in the lliad and the Odyssey. The central theme that I will bring forward in this talk, namely, the Tree of the Golden Bough standing at the entrance of the underworld, goes a long way in making this connection, and, indeed, we could say that the very notion of epic heroism is at stake, as it goes on developing in western literature. Also, Adam and Eve in Milton’s Paradise Lost are modeled off of Aeneas and Dido. For example, the Dido story goes a long way in linking the actions of Part I of Don Quixote. A final goal that I have in meditating on the role of Dido in the Aeneid is to better articulate some of the central themes and characters in western literature in the 2000 years following Virgil. To this end, I will give the sketch of an idea pertaining to the importance of Dido for the quest for Italy, and along the way I will introduce another author that I have just discovered to have had an enormous influence on the Aeneid, namely, Apollonius of Rhodes. Now I want to further that project by showing that Lucretius’ poem besieges the character of Dido in Books 1 through 4 of the Aeneid and that this siege goes some way toward explaining the strife that necessarily erupts between the golden queen and Father Aeneas. My particular focus was to show the presence of all of the chief elements of Lucretius’ poem in Book 1 of the Aeneid. Last year, I undertook to show that in the Aeneid Virgil simulates, in their entirety, the plots of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura.

Why? Why this unproclaimed, dampened, doomed meeting between Father Aeneas and Queen Dido? What does it mean for these two, and for the Tyrian and Trojan peoples? The answer lies in a golden apple and a wooden horse.

Now, at this critical moment, Juno comes down in her wrath to destroy the Trojan fleet in a violent tempest, and Aeneas’ folk, instead of north to Italy, are driven south, down to the bottom of the world, down to Libya and Carthage. Half his heart goes into the underworld with the spirit of Anchises, and so only a half-hearted launch is effected from Sicily’s shores. It is hard to overstate the devastation wrought in Aeneas by this death.

And yet, when Aeneas reaches the west point of Sicily, poised to accomplish the short last stage of the voyage to the mouth of the Tiber River, everything changes. Everything in this prophecy proceeds in a straight line there are no reversals predicted. Helenus is a prophet of Apollo, and he foretells to Aeneas the chief stages that remain of the voyage of the Trojans to Italy. During his sea voyage from Troy, Aeneas discovers, in the land of Epirus, the new kingdom of little Troy established by Helenus, one of the sons of Priam, who has married the widow of Hector, Andromache. In many ways, she seems like a distraction, a dodge from the main action of the poem. And yet, the part she has to play in that tale is difficult to understand. Dido, the queen of Carthage, refugee from the Kingdom of Tyre on the borders of the Holy Land, stands at the center of the tale told by Virgil’s Aeneid.

Tyrian 2000 fleet mission