See also Boemer , who argues that Ovid relied more on Accius than Sophocles. In traditional mythology Tereus was not hracian but either Megarian Pausanias 1. Finally, in traditional mythology, Tereus had been transformed by the god into a hawk as, for example, Aesch. On the contemporary political implications of the hracian setting see Zacharia.
West on WD ; but see also the cautionary remarks of Burnett n. As has often been pointed out, tyranny is especially characterized in the Greek mind by overpowering and often bizarre erotic impulses;26 and, as Benardete notes, Herodotus only uses the term eros of kings and tyrants. He has no wing feathers — and, coming out from a nap, he was, more than likely, dressed only in the short tunic and thus, only very mini- mally decked out.
Tereus turns out to be a sanguine and helpful friend for the two Athenians. He answers their questions and listens to what they want. So what sort of city would you most like to live in? Where the greatest troubles are of this sort: By Zeus, such wretched troubles you desire. And what about you? I desire the same sort of thing. Poor you for your wretchedness, such ills you desire. After each of the two Athenians describes his ideal town the hoopoe cries Euelpides describes a situ- ation in which one of his friends invites him to his home to celebrate giving away his daughter to a new home.
Virgil, Aeneid, 4.1–299
In contrast to these erotic longings of human beings, Tereus goes on to describe bird life as free from the constant longing for more — What is this life with birds like? For you know it well. It suits me very nicely. First of all here you must live without a wallet. You have taken a lot of counterfeit out of life. And we feed in gardens on white sesame and myrtleberries and poppies and mint.
Well, you live the life of newlyweds. Because there is no scarcity in the gardens there is no need for money, no counterfeit, no competition for wealth. In part, this is an example of the comic device of capping. Tereus, on the other hand, has found in this life a respite from his hyper-erotic life on the Sophoclean stage. In this world, he now lives happily with Procne. Euelpides is, quite rightly, surprised to learn that a bird should have a slave. One never sees a bird actually serve another in nature.
In nature birds are seen to feed on what they happen to chance upon around them; they do not require or, it appears, desire the assistance of other birds. In reply to this question the slave bird puts forward his own hypothesis 75— Does a bird actually need a servant? Yes, this one does, because, as I think, being once a human being, sometimes he gets a desire to eat Phalerian white-bait, and I grab a bowl and run for whitebait; or he has an appetite for pea soup, he needs a ladle and pot — I run for the ladle. But Aristophanes shows us how meta- morphosis, both from a man to a bird, and from the tragic stage onto the comic stage, has afected him.
His eros, once for incest and acts of hybris, characteristic of a tyrant, has become an eros for whitebait and soup. He is neither his old, tyrannical self, nor yet completely a bird. Once Peisetairus introduces the possibility of a polis of birds, the equation changes. Within a polis the boundaries are demarcated and hierarchies are necessarily set up. The choosing among options, however, did not make behaviour easier, because making the right choices among a complex multitude of options came to depend on social skills that could no longer be learned on the basis of simply being obedient to authorities and fixed rules.
It demanded the capacity to attune oneself to changes in the specific parameters of each particular relation and situation. These demands coincided with rising empathy together with openness, ease and reflexive caution.
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People were increasingly drawn into the social competition of learning the necessary skills and preform them with ease, and this competition intensified in the course of following decades and spread from circles of calculating politicians and commercial entrepreneurs to the much wider circles of calculating citizens. In this competition, the personality capital of a habitus that allows for more subtle, sensitive and flexible behaviour turned into a national habitus, and more or less simultaneously, into the international habitus of the rich West.
As a whole, these developments demanded a prolonged as well as a more intimate process of teaching and learning social steering codes, thus prolonging both parenthood and childhood. Both transformations were captured in the expression century of the child Key, []. Particularly in this century, the emancipation of children and teenagers in relation to parents and their representatives - and of women in relation to men - clearly implied rising levels of equality as well as of intimacy.
Since about the s, traditional emphasis in child rearing shifted from emphasising subservience to institutional and adult authority, sanctioned by corporal and other punishments, to an emphasis on qualities linked to the self-regulation of children, sanctioned by reasoning and differentiations in warmth and permissiveness. Emotional investment in love-and-learn relations accelerated particularly since the s and s, when this trend was backed up by rising levels of material security and physical safety. Parents developed more intimate relations with their children and in these relations, children experienced a type of discipline or social control that was less directed at obedience than at self-control and self-steering, that is, at learning to think and decide for themselves cf.
Simultaneously, having and raising children became increasingly important for providing an unthinking sense of belonging and a source of motivation in life, whereas religion and political ideology, even social class, gender, and nationality lost much of that capacity. For increasing numbers of people, the love-and-learn relations with their children became a major provider of meaning in their life and their strongest motivating power. In raising children, a warmer and more intimate, flexible and cautious parental control on the self-control of children spread and became known as love-oriented discipline Bronfenbrenner, The general trend towards rising empathy, openness and reflexive caution in relations particularly pertains to relations involving sexuality.
The emancipation of women and young people went hand in hand with an emancipation of their sexuality, and at the same time, parents - of different social classes to varying degrees - have taken more of the interests and feelings of their children into account and also more of the sexuality of their teenagers. However, it was only since the Sexual Revolution that women, including young women themselves have actively taken part in public discussions about their carnal desires and how to achieve a more satisfactory lust-balance - the balance between longings for sexual gratification and for enduring relational intimacy.
From then on, increasingly large groups of people have been experimenting in try-out relations between the extremes of desexualized love sexual longing subordinated to the continuation of a relationship and depersonalized sexual contact, and the extremes of becoming a sexual object and a sexual subject. This try-out process provoked many new and more varied answers to what might be called the lust-balance question: From the s onwards, topics and practices such as premarital sex, sexual variations, unmarried cohabitation, adultery, fornication, extramarital affairs, jealousy, homosexuality, pornography, teenage sex, abortion, exchange of partners, paedophilia, incest and so on, all part of a wider process of sexualisation, implied repeated up-rooting confrontations with the traditional lust-balance.
People were confronted with the lust-balance question more frequently and intensely than ever before. This question is first raised in puberty or adolescence when bodily and erotic impulses and emotions that were banned from interaction from early childhood onwards except in cases of incest and paedophilia are again explored and experimented with.
The original need for bodily contact of small children and their subsequent frank and spontaneous explorations stay without mirroring Fonagy, and seem to be restricted and stopped when adults begin to experience them as sexual. Sexuality and corporality are thus separated from other forms of contact and compartmentalised. In puberty and adolescence, when the longings and demands for intimacy and confidentiality of teenagers are already quite developed, the taboo on touching and bodily contact has to be gradually dismantled. More or less overcome by their new longing for sexual pleasure and gratification, young people have to integrate this longing into both their personality and their relations.
They have to learn how to become a sexual subject and a sexual object and to find a balance between the two. For most, this is a process of trial and error. In the process of sexualisation and eroticisation, especially since the Sexual Revolution, women collectively came into a similar position as young people when becoming sexually mature: In the twentieth century, especially since the s, this process of trial and error has been going on collectively. Allowing for differences in nationality and social class, the subsequent moments of collective learning processes determined to a large extent the range of available options that individuals living in each moment saw themselves confronted with.
It made for sexual relations that were not necessarily confidential, even between husband and wife. Sexual intimacy did not demand much relational or personal intimacy. This is typical for a lust balance in which the longing for sex and the longing for enduring relational intimacy are not strongly integrated, can be even highly segregated. The view on widening options and a collective process of trial and error seems in conflict with the fact that in most Western countries, the old rule of sexual abstinence before marriage was formally maintained up to the s.
Dutch research - my major source of data - shows that young people of the generation born at the beginning of the twentieth century postponed their first coitus on average until ten years after becoming sexually mature. The generation of about waited seven years, an average decline of 10 months per 10 years. This downward trend continued, for the generation of waited 5 years, which was a decline of 7 months per 10 years. Apparently, this decline was at a slower pace than that of the generations before World War II Vliet, And although the pill did of course allow for more and more varied sexuality and for greater emotional tranquillity in seeking sexual pleasure, these findings nevertheless seem to allow the conclusion that the Sexual Revolution was not as revolutionary in terms of such crucial sexual behaviour as first carnal love as it was in terms of opening the public debate on sexuality and of stopping the hypocrisy of formally upholding the ban on premarital sexuality.
However, as the balance of power between women and men as well as between parents and children became less uneven, possibilities for more frank and warm intimate relations increased For men, the change was mainly towards an eroticization or sensualisation of sex. Male sexual pleasure came to depend more strongly upon the sensual or erotic bond with the sex partner, that is, upon relational intimacy.
They also came to experience women not mainly as sexual objects but as much as sexual subjects. For women, the change was towards a sexualization of love and becoming a sexual subject as much as a sexual object. Together, these changes made for one integrated process of sexualisation and eroticisation that permeated across the board of social life, private as well as public. As the part-process of sexualization draws much more attention, also because it repeatedly provoked moral indignation, the significance of the part-process of eroticisation is often only partly acknowledged.
Until the s, the trial and error process towards easier and comradelier relations between women and men has many trajectories but at least two that are differentiated by social class. One trajectory involves good society [gute Gesellschaft] and groups of families largely directing themselves to its model, In the s, young people from these social classes had limited opportunities to select a marriage partner - that stage been set by parents strictly controlling courtship activities. An example is dancing, which was held in high esteem as a courting arena.
Only at a private ball or diner-dance could a young man dance with a girl of this social class. But first he had to ask her parents for permission, and when he was listed in her dancing programme he might opt for a second dance with the same girl, but opting for a third dance would create expectations and obligations, directly connected to getting engaged and then married. This scene changed as young women went out to work in such places like offices, libraries, hospitals, and schools, and aimed at financial independence.
In addition, sports and bicycles and the dance craze of the s opened up less cramped meeting opportunities. Young people were allowed increasingly to visit public dancing places and to organise private dance parties only for themselves. In the Netherlands, the informalisation of courtship activities and engagements in good society also consisted of an erosion of this official pledge to marry and young people more easily breaking off their engagement.
From the s onward, this more easy-going attitude is documented from increasing complaints [by authors of Dutch manners books] about young people breaking off their engagements light-heartedly as well as from advice, based on this change, to scale down the engagement from a formal and public pledge to get married to a relatively small gathering, no longer the big ceremonious occasion that an engagement used to be.
In the social classes where young daughters usually would work as salesgirls, domestic servants, or in workshops, the codes of good society hardly functioned as a model, and parents traditionally allowed their offspring to attend meeting and mating occasions like fairgrounds or promenades for strolling. Couples would form, and many a marriage was arranged after a young woman got pregnant Hessen, In their marriages, most husbands and wives followed traditional patterns of married life: These traditions ruled in most villages and working-class neighbourhoods.
The trend in the direction of young people escaping from under their parental wings and experimenting with erotic relations under their own steam can be presented by focusing on new words and practices. An important new practice is indicated by the rise in the s of the word verkering; it was derived from the verb verkeren, which means to be or move in [this or that] company. In the s, the word acquired a romantic connotation, particularly when it was transformed into the noun verkering.
In Dutch good society, however, people looked down on verkering, both the word and the practice. In their view it was a disgustingly bad habit among the middle and lower classes, and they continued to perceive an engagement as the only proper arrangement that builds up to marriage. Thus, they tried to ban the practice by banning the word, and would always call their try-out relation an engagement, even when the couple had never been through a formal engagement ceremony more details in Wouters, ; A demonstration of the long lasting power of this good society habitus is presented by a psychologist and journalist in her review of my book:.
A couple could be married or engaged, but there was no name for the preceding phase, at least not in manners books giving advice on these thorny problems. The word verkering was used only in the vernacular and just did not apply to people in higher or bourgeois circles. Verkering or vaste verkering was something the kitchen maid had with her soldier. Another new practice and neologism of the s is scharrelen literally: Girls who indulged in the practice could be called a scharrel and were in danger of being seen as a town bike.
A similar negative word was the amatrice female amateur. From the s to the s, it expressed the moral concern of Dutch upper and middle classes about the morality of girls in the younger generation. These girls had sex, which should not happen and if it did, it should be kept secret or denied, for even the suspicion of indulging in having sex could damage their reputation and respectability and, therefore, their future chances for a good marriage.
But when denial became impossible, for example because more and more girls came to visit physicians and clinics with venereal diseases, the word amatrice was invented:. The appearance on the scene of the amatrice as a dramatis personae This figure of the amatrice evaporated completely in the Sexual Revolution.
With the moral stigma removed, the amatrice became a girl with a steady relationship, a normal girl who had verkering or vaste verkering. She was, in fact, going steady.
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Parents were advised to give freer rein to their adolescent children by gedogen, conditionally allowing of such a practice, usually combined with a policy of cautious determent. In this way they tried to hang on by discreet yet distinct attempts at staying in the scene with their children, thus maintaining both an intimate bond and a guiding eye.
It seems obvious, however, that particularly from the s onward, the try-out relations of young people, whether called an engagement or a verkering, were becoming increasingly sexual details in Wouters, ; This notion of inappropriate repetition, only obliquely intimated here, will become explicit with instauratque diem donis in And not only that: Indeed, the way Virgil has constructed his vignette — choosing a very early stage in the process leading up to the sacrifical killing — leaves the felicity of the sacrifice open.
As Servius points out ad locum , the pouring of the wine does not in itself constitute a sacrifice, but served to ascertain, by observation of how the animal reacted, whether or not the victim was well chosen non est sacrificium sed hostiae exploratio, utrum apta sit. As Henderson points out per litteras , Virgil also sets up a striking affinity between Dido and the victim: Commentators tend to read spatiatur straight: It is, to say the least, suggestive that Virgil has inverted normal ritual sequence by moving from a libation at the altar to moving towards altars ad aras ; set up by ante ora deum , at which, by all accounts, she has already sacrificed previously.
Taken as a whole, then, and in context, this line conveys a sense of unfocused drifting from altar to altar however solemn in gait Dido may be moving about that contrasts sharply with the deliberate and purposeful adeunt in line A particularly striking instance which ultimately failed comes from Livy Petilio consulibus, quo die magistratum inierunt, immolantibus Ioui singulis bubus, uti solet, in ea hostia, qua Q.
Petilius sacrificauit, in iocinere caput non inuentum. In the victim that Q. Petilius sacrificed, no lobe was found on the liver. When this was reported to the senate, they ordered him to keep sacrificing bulls until he obtained favourable omes. Petilius] added to the anxiety; he reported that, as the lobe had been missing from the liver of his first victim, he had failed to obtain favourable omensfrom three further bulls. The senate ordered the sacrifices to continue with the larger victims until the obtainment of favourable omens.
They say that in the sacrifices for the other divinities favourable omens were obtained, but that Petilius did not obtain favourable omens in those for Salus. But his death does not expose the gods as unreliable or malicious — indeed, rather the opposite: With Dido, we have a similar scenario: The hyperbaton in spirantia consulit exta produces a similar effect, articulating on the stylistic level the idea that Dido examines each bit of entrail separately.
There are subtler ways to convey a sense of what the gods communicate to Dido. The overall thrust of the passage would seem to suggest that what Dido sees is not what she wants to see: Arguably, this is the essential point Virgil makes in this passage and he can make it without going into details about the innards that Dido looks at: Together with the quindecemuiri sacris faciundis , who presided over the collection and the exegesis of Sibylline Oracles, and the augurs, who interpreted the behaviour of birds, the haruspices formed one of the three priestly colleges in charge of communication between the Roman res publica and the supernatural sphere.
Virgil has again opted for a tripartite structure, with a gradual increase in length across the segments, consisting of an exclamation heu It is not immediately obvious whose minds are meant since uatum the genitive plural of uates , i. Dido does not learn from the sacrifices that her love for Aeneas is going to lead to a bad end [but: We are then free to imagine all sorts of scenarios.
Virgil has plenty of it. But here a bit more probing may resolve the ambiguity. From a thematic rather than syntactic point of view, the text raises two basic questions: So who are the uates mentioned here? Dido acted like a haruspex. Why does Virgil describe the divinatory practice of one type of religious specialist and then allude to another?
Now, the notion that Dido has a crowd of ignorant haruspices-uates at her service has no support whatsoever in the text. But uates-figures of course do feature in the Aeneid — seer-prophets who have access to fatum especially in the genitive plural there is a specious etymological link: Three come to mind specially: Apollo; the Sibyl; and the narrator, who outs himself as a uates at Aeneid 7. This is rather illustrious company, and one may wonder why Virgil would here be making a throw-away gesture to the ignorant minds of prophets despite the fact that the authorial persona he adopts in the Aeneid is precisely that of a uates.
What Virgil seems to be saying is the following: Here there can be no doubt that uatum is an objective genitive, and the anonymous uates here are presumably the same as the anonymous uates in Book 4 and form the human equivalent to the Parcae of the proem. These predictions come back to haunt her: On the divine level, of course, the rough and ready history of Carthage and Rome has always been known: This also makes sense in how the text continues: In the world of the Aeneid key religious practices and institutions that normally shape interaction between humans and gods and are designed to enable humans to have a say in how history unfolds by winning over divinities with gifts and sacrifices are rendered at least to some degree impotent: Note, though, that Virgil never says that they send Dido signs that lie!
But to know about fatum , you had better get to know what the uates have to say — however imperfect and misleading some of their utterances may turn out to be. Divinely inspired madness for the purpose of divining the future — such as the one the Sibyl experiences when possessed by Apollo — is different. This is the first time in the book that Virgil diagnoses Dido as suffering from outright insanity a diagnosis deftly prepared for by ignarae mentes: Dido is by no means the only character to come under the sway of furor in the poem: It is also a quality that occurs in vistas that look forward to historical Rome.
Scanning of the line reveals that mollis with long-is modifies medullas , which is reinforced by the elegant alliteration and the pleasing pattern of vowels: Put differently, Virgil continues to assimilate Dido to a sacrificial victim. Instead of inspecting the entrails of animals, she ought to inspect herself. He thereby also turns himself into a haruspex who performs extispicy on his character, inviting us to join him in his exercise of invasive ethopoeia: What does he show and what do we learn, not least about us?
Are we just as eager as Dido cf. Or do we rather adopt the know-it-all posture of the omniscient uates for whom the future holds no secrets? It is a major step forward from the metaphorical fire of love at the beginning of the book to the funeral pyre at the end. But the hermeneutic challenge or opportunity created by the simile does not stop here.
There are many further points of contact or correspondence between the world of the narrative and the world briefly invoked in the simile that are worth identifying and discussing. In this case, the interface between narrative and simile is particularly complex. To begin with, incautam is a curious touch. Why does Virgil appear to apportion part of the blame for getting shot to death to the poor creature?
And is there an equivalent to the unwary behaviour of the hind in how Dido has conducted herself? Is Virgil perhaps suggesting that Dido was too susceptible to the charms of Aeneas and should have been more on her guard? At the same time, procul and incautam stand in latent contradiction to one another: Furthermore, the portrayal of the pastor in the simile likens him to Aeneas. But what are the precise correspondences between the herdsman and Aeneas?
The one who has so far been shooting at deer in the Aeneid is the Trojan hero, who killed seven of them right after being washed ashore in Libya, one for each of his ships: In hindsight, these lines acquire a proleptic force, though Aeneas focused on stags. The design is intricate: The-que in liquitque links fixit and liquit.
Virgil also achieves an interlacing of words referring to the hind quam , incautam and the action of getting pierced with an arrow from afar procul , fixit ; and he uses two emphatic instances of enjambment to foreground the shepherd and his actions The position of the adverb procul enacts what the word means: However, the word-choice, I believe, is deliberate, designed to recall the simile of the shepherd in 2.
No longer the unwitting spectator and victim of fiery fury, Aeneas has now become the unwitting perpetrator of the same, the innocent agent of all that he abhors. Entirely against his will, half-ignorant to the very end, he destroys the woman he loves, leaving her to the agonies of the fury he has caused, ultimately to the suicide which is implied in this very simile. After he abandons Carthage and looks back from the sea at the flames that rise from the pyre, where she lies pierced by his own sword, he does not know the reason for the fire causa latet 5.
How far he has moved into the bitter world of reality from that pastoral innocence! How little he understands the destructive consequences of his actions! Here is Lyne, taking issue with Austin among others, who have the tendency to exculpate the shooter: He has, Vergil tells us, been vigorously and purposefully hunting the hind: What he is ignorant of is that one of his shafts has struck: One important difference is that the shepherd does not pursue the hind because he does not realize that his arrow has hit the mark; Aeneas, of course, leaves Dido knowing full well the extent to which she has fallen in love with him.
Dicte without being able to shake off the lethal arrow in her side. Dictaeus refers to Mt. Dicte on Crete; Virgil places the geographical specification, which is more precise than the earlier nemora inter Cresia , in enjambment. The continuing emphasis on the Cretan setting is remarkable and has long puzzled commentators. The arrow slips easily from his flesh, pain vanishes, and strength is restored. See Virgil, Eclogue 6, for a take on this. Britomartis or renamed Dictynna: Dictaeos; haeret lateri letalis harundo: There is a powerful and brutal finality to the measured phrase haeret lateri letalis harundo.
Alliteration ha- , ha- and assonance -re-,-run- link the framing words haeret and harundo and alliteration and vowel-patterning a , e , i ; e , a , i link the central lateri scanning short, short, long and letalis , whereas lateri stands as dative object to haeret and letalis modifies harundo: The wound is fatal, but the process of dying will be prolonged, an ominous image that stands in poignant parallel to what will unfold with Dido in the rest of the book. After sagitta , tela , and ferrum , harundo is the fourth term Virgil uses to denote the fatal arrow.
Throughout, the syntax of the passage is predominantly paratactic the main verbs are underlined , but Virgil has slightly altered the rhetorical design as he moves from daytime to evening. In 74—76 we get four main verbs ducit — ostentat; incipit — resistit , of which the first two and the last two are linked by-que Sidoniasque ; mediaque , whereas incipit follows on ostentat asyndetically.
In 77—79, we get a tricolon quaerit — exposcit — pendet , with all verbs linked by-que Iliacosque ; pendetque. Aeneas and Dido are placed in the middle of media The lexeme moenia almost invariably recalls the last line of the proem, the altae moenia Romae 1. Here it carries a latent accusatory charge: Aeneas ought not to be sightseeing among the walls of Carthage; he should see to his mission, which will eventually result in the walls of Rome.
Sidoniasque ostentat opes urbemque paratam: Virgil has arranged attributes and nouns chiastically: The adjective Sidonias refers to Sidon, a city in Phoenicia; the phrase Sidonias Dido retains the same spirit of remarkable generosity though now reinforced by amorous passion that animated her invitation to the shipwrecked Trojans to stay, before she had even set eyes on Aeneas 1. The city I build is yours The asyndetic continuation of the main clauses with incipit conveys a sense of the mental effort Dido has to make to muster sufficient courage to address Aeneas, only to break off midway.
Put differently, she acts like a tongue-tied teenager in love. A reference to a re-run of Iliadic material also brings to mind the fact that Virgil, in the Aeneid , re-works Homer: In the light of how Aeneas reacted to the first request to tell his tale 2. Aeneas, however, seems to oblige willingly. Here as elsewhere in the opening of Book 4, he leads a very shadowy existence in the narrative and hardly figures as an independent agent. English uses the same idiom: A striking and compelling parallel is Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 1. Mars] pastures on love his greedy sight while gazing on you, goddess [sc.
It is designed as a tricolon, with the two-que after lumen and suadent linking the three verbs: Line 81 is entirely dactylic, rushing everybody off to sleep — somnos is the telos of both the verse and the action it describes and the sense of falling asleep or coming to the end of the hexameter is deftly enacted by the soothing coincidence of word accent and ictus in the final three words, linked by s-alliteration suadentia , sidera , somnos and the fact that the rhythm slows down: Dido throws herself onto the couch that Aeneas has just left and broods there, an action reflected in the enjambment of incubat , which takes the dative stratis relictis.
Both circumstantial participles have concessive force: Most likely, the moment in the day when she cuddles with Ascanius is anyway not the evening: Still, the image unsettles: Dido, demens as she is, is increasingly getting out of control. In metrical position and effect in enjambment, caesura after first foot detinet 85 mirrors incubat 82 , underscoring the switch in focus — from Dido sleeplessly brooding on her bed to fondling Ascanius in her lap. The passage belongs into a sequence that begins at 1. The sense of the participle is causal — Dido cuddles Ascanius because he resembles his father.
Beyond its literal meaning, the phrase genitoris imago resonates powerfully within the memorial culture of republican and early imperial Rome. Imago , or, in the plural, imagines were the wax masks of deceased former magistrates that hung in the atria of noble houses and were donned by actors during the funeral processions of deceased members of the family who had held public office. This was one of the most remarkable rituals of the Roman republic, designed to celebrate family-achievement and lineage.
Both the attribute infandum and the phrase fallere amorem raise tricky problems of interpretation. What does fallere refer to here? At least three possible interpretations come to mind, depending on what precisely fallere and amor are taken to mean. Maclennan argues that Dido here tries to delude herself: One could consider reading amorem with a capital A Amorem , especially since the scene here strongly recalls 1. It is as if Dido is keen on another dose of Love. Conversely, one could argue that the scene in Book 4 is an attempt to invert the deception: Virgil describes the disastrous effects of Dido in love on her city-building project, emphasized by the anaphora of non italicized , in two tricola, one consisting of verbs, the other of nouns: Especially with this line resonating here, the passage subtly intimates that two sets of walls have ceased to make progress: With coeptae turres , portus aut propugnacula One possible answer could be that minae , inevitably, invokes the future threats are inherently prospective and hence draws attention to the incomplete state of the building works.
The m-alliteration in minae murorum is continued by machina. But from then on, it is difficult to keep track of how many days have been passing by. Going by the imprecise temporal markers in 63 instauratque diem donis and 82—85, it is just about possible to cram the action of Aeneid 4. In particular, the comment on the abandoned building works in 86—89 that concludes this section, implies that more time has elapsed than a three-day period.
Still, it is important to bear in mind that Aeneas both arrives and departs during the same non-sailing season. What has he been up to while we learn about Dido in love? We only get glimpses of him, in very passive roles: It is almost as if Virgil gives his protagonist a break, after three full books in the narrative limelight. Homer, too, has long stretches in which Achilles and Odysseus all but disappear from view.
Still, developments have reached something of an impasse, and in such situations the epic poet has at his disposal a reliable source of new narrative stimuli: The action now shifts back to the divine plane, with Juno, the goddess of conjugal bonds, who has faded from the narrative after derailing the fleet of Aeneas at the very beginning of the epic accosting and confronting Venus, the goddess of erotic passion.
The two scheming divinities, one more deceitful than the other, engage in a battle of wits. Each one walks away in the belief to have fooled the other. Only Venus, of course, is right: She has, after all, been briefed in the workings of destiny by none other than Jupiter see Aeneid 1. Here is the section in outline: Juno seeks out Venus 93— Venus hidden thoughts 2. The parallels, set out by Nelis and Hall, are as follows: The opening gambit includes a sarcastic comment: Ironically, in Apollonius, this plan consists in Aphrodite calling upon Eros to enchant Medea with desire for Jason—exactly what Venus, in Virgil, then does also to Dido, much to the displeasure of Juno.
Viewed intertextually, Venus clearly has learned a trick or two from past encounters with the queen of the gods. And, of course, in Virgil the power relation is inverted: This manifests itself not least in a slippage in plot: But when Juno approaches Venus in Virgil, the erotic assault on the heroine is already a fait accompli: In intertextual terms, then, it is payback time: Within the simul-ac-clause , persensit introduces an indirect statement that falls into two parts linked by nec.
In the light of our discussion of time, the per- in persensit is important: The wording recalls 1. Henderson, per litteras , proposes Catullus Juno has been absent from the narrative for a while, and upon her re-entry Virgil goes out of his way to stress her important position within the Olympic pantheon: Juno chisels her opening, a conditional sequence, into the air with meticulous deliberation and emphasis, verse by self-standing verse: Some editors, however, including Conington and Pease prefer to read nomen instead of numen and to punctuate differently: Which reading do you prefer and why?
Its accusative object is presented chiastically: This sarcastic praise for a conquest that could not have been easier to achieve may deliberately recall Iliad 5, where Aphrodite saves Aeneas from Diomedes, though not without being wounded in the process, leading to much lament. This love tragedy soups and serves up superpower struggle on the world stage: What a mess the Aeneid is making of getting from Troy to Rome — wrong continent, wrong genre Juno does not give her rival a lot of verse-space; after the monosyllabic tu at the outset, she devotes the rest of the line to an appreciation of Cupid.
Numen stresses the efficaciousness of divine power; it can either denote a divinity in its own right as here: Later on in our passage, Mercury will refer to Jupiter as deum Ironically, Juno, who was the object of theological commentary by Virgil in the proem, has now turned into the commentator: Juno does not seem interested in justice at all. For her, this is a matter of power and the pursuit of selfish interests. She does not remonstrate with Venus that Dido suffers unfairly. Rather, she mocks her counterpart for a cheap victory. The difference between the human and the divine perspective is telling: The protasis of the explanatory si-clause here comes after the apodosis refertis.
Juno points out that Dido never had a chance, whether in terms of ontology and gender a mortal femina vs. Virgil stresses the contrast by placing una and duorum at either end of the verse. With the phrasing moenia nostra In both passages, we are dealing with a so-called transferred epithet: That Juno mentions moenia modified by the proud-possessive-protective nostra in the same breath arguably highlights her rhetorical gaffe.
But we may pardon the goddess for not being in top form, given her state of emotional distress: Iuno ], with id refering to the future destruction of Carthage by the Romans. In a more conciliatory vein, she begins to question the point and purpose of the scheming, enquiring into the limit of what she considers an excessive use of divine force.
She then poses, in a sentence that fittingly lacks a verb such as tendimus , the open-ended question what all that strife and meddling is supposed to achieve: As it turns out, the reduction of Dido to a state of hopeless passion is now derailing the founding of two great cities: Juno, for her own selfish interests to be sure, tries to offer a way out of the deadlock. More generally speaking, Venus has seemingly gained very little from unleashing the powers of her son to the fullest extent or even caused significant damage: She of course knows, after her consultation with Jupiter, that matters will turn out well in the end: Juno wraps her offer to Venus in impressive rhetoric: Note the husteron proteron in line What looks like a generous proposal is in fact both insidious communem and deeply problematic in terms of practical arrangement paribus auspiciis.
The Scholia Danielis cited by Pease put the finger on the problem by asking whether communem means that Juno offers Venus joint rule of her city Carthage or that Tyrians and Trojans will have merged into one populus. The former of course all but implies the latter: Juno never spells this out she only mentions marriage of their two princely and principal charges , but in effect she here suggests for Carthage what has been pre-scripted for Italy: In other words, she here again plots to derail fatum and the founding of Rome.
Taken literally, with paribus auspiciis Juno proposes that each goddess has to consult the other on anything before taking any action and that the opinion of each has exactly equal weight. It is an interesting question of how they would have worked this in practice.
But this sort of collegial arrangement is fraught with problems and can break down easily Eteocles and Polynices also initially agreed to rule in alternating years: In Augustan Rome, especially, after a century of civil bloodshed had proven the difficulty of sharing power, the mode of government that Juno evokes with communem and paribus auspiciis would probably have been deemed doomed to failure.
When she utters the phrase Phrygio seruire marito she is best imagined as spitting in disgust: I am willing, she says, to enslave my Dido to a slave. Juno hams it up to show how much she is apparently yielding. Her speech falls into three parts: Dido conceives of herself as a figure under the sway of fickle fortune see esp. As Quint has pointed out, the Aeneid tends to associate the losers of history with fortuna and the winners with fatum ; but in aesthetic terms the tragic figures of fortune arguably prevail over the characters who carry destiny on their shoulders: Their fortunes become personalized, allowing for the assertion of selfhood and the willfulness that make Dido and Turnus the most vivid characters in the poem.
Some of the formulations in this passage recall the encounter between Hera and Aphrodite the Greek counterparts of Juno and Venus in Iliad 14, where Hera approaches Aphrodite to borrow her girdle of erotic desire so she can lull her husband into a post-coital slumber in order to abet the Greeks.
Since Aphrodite of course favours the Trojans, Hera tells her a cock-and-bull story about needing the girdle to reconcile the estranged couple of Oceanus and Tethys. Laughter-loving Aphrodite answered her: She will do it justice in Virgil at below; and unlike in Homer, she is not to be deceived. Juno is elided, just like the esse that completes locutam. The subject of auerteret is Juno; in prose, the accusative of direction Libycas oras would normally have taken the preposition ad. The chiastic design of regnum Italiae Libycas oras stylistically underscores the intended redirection, with the two geographical markers juxtaposed in the centre and Italy yielding to Libya note the homoioteleuton-cas,-ras.
Since Iliad 1, nodding ab- nuat is a trademarked way of Olympian divinities to signal assent or as here dissent from above. When Venus asks quis The way she wriggles out of this dilemma is deft indeed: In other words, Venus knows very well that what Juno here plans will never become a factum. To some degree Virgil, the retrospective prophet, has eliminated contingency from his literary universe, tracing a story that is in outline historically predetermined — which in this case means that Juno will not be able to shape history the way she wants.
With her maliciously double-layered and disingenuous gesture to fortuna , Venus reminds Juno that the successful execution of her scheme is not entirely up to them, but also secretly mocks her antagonist in the full knowledge that her scheming will be in vain. Venus is trying to be evasive, and well she might. To be knowledgeable of the future sure is a nice position to be in: Troiaque profectis refer to the respective origins of the ethnic communities of Dido, i.
Venus invokes two models: She thereby signals awareness of two different ways of conceiving of a socio-political entity, nicely contrasted by means of the chiasmus a misceri b populos b foedera a iungi: The two are of course not mutually exclusive. Here the merger of two peoples is only mooted as a hypothetical possibility; but the theme dominates the second half of the Aeneid , which revolves around the merging of Trojans and Latins, again at the level of a royal couple Aeneas and Lavinia and two entire peoples. There, too, Virgil uses both ethnic and legal terminology to describe the union See e.
Iouis es], tibi fas [sc. Description of the context in which the goddesses should strike: Aeneas and Dido go hunting 3 lines. She has absolutely no intention to consult with Jupiter any time soon. Far from clearing her plan with her husband beforehand, she clearly intends to let him know only after the liasion between Dido and Aeneas is already a fait accompli if at all: The tone is both matey and dismissive, as Juno instantly moves on. With nunc her attitude changes as she sets out methodically qua ratione and briefly paucis what the two goddesses ought to do on their own and right away quod instat , contrasting with iste labor.
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Perhaps Juno is rather being chummy and conspiratorial? The-a of una scans long: Juno mentions Aeneas only by his bare name, without ornamental epithet, whereas Dido receives an attribute in the superlative for a similar snide innuendo see line But what is the force of miserrima , which recalls and stands in implicit contrast to the pulcherrima Virgil uses elsewhere?
Or is it proleptic, as the Scholia Danielis would have it: The-que links extulerit and retexerit. Usually it is the narrator who establishes the setting with evocative descriptions cf. What follows is her plot: The hyperbaton of subject The word order of nigrantem commixta grandine nimbum is iconic: In Book 1, Juno enlisted Aeolus to unleash a storm. In Book 7, she will enlist the Fury Allecto to unleash hell on earth. The thunderstorm here is her own creation, and while the imagery is impressive both here and when Virgil describes the actual event , the spot of bad weather pales in comparison to the cosmic upheaval caused by the winds and the fury: Juno plans to underscore her deluge with a suitable soundtrack that will rattle heaven.
Note the two elisions infundam et and caelum omne , giving metrical support to the theme of pouring rain and resounding thunder. They are frightening, and are often taken as a means of the gods to communicate with humans. To combat this notion, Lucretius, in the final book of his De Rerum Natura , an account of the world grounded in Epicurean physics Epicurus was an atomist who dismissed divine interference in human affairs as noxious superstition , devotes a lengthy discussion of what natural phenomena might cause thunderstorms, trying to dispel any irrational fear of them. Some of the language is quite close: Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 6.
The postponed et has a double effect: Both the elevation of Dido and the slighting of Aeneas that the word order entails are of course fully in line with how the speaker Juno sees matters more generally. The postponed et thus underpins a beautifully subtle piece of ethopoiea. The use of dux here also harks back to 1. On the diaeresis after deuenient see Austin: Juno captures her own involvement in a tricolon: Some have suspected line here as a repetition of 1.
At the same time, the comparison with 1. In Book 1, Juno gives Aeolus the following promise 71— Sunt mihi bis septem praestanti corpore nymphae, quarum quae forma pulcherrima, Deiopea, conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo. In Book 4, however, matters are less clear. Juno obviously intends to link Dido and Aeneas in wedlock and will give over Dido to Aeneas as his own. But the person whom she addresses here, as the equivalent to Aeolus, is Venus.
The awkward syntax thus continues her policy of marginalizing and eliding the Trojan hero, and it even generates an interesting ambiguity: What initially may look like a sharp and unambiguous punchline — hic hymenaeus erit — is anything but: The former reading seems feeble; but if the meaning is supposed to be the latter, the use of the singular hymenaeus is unusual. But she is quite happy to play along. But this interpretation yields a feeble sense: Venus] enim simulata mente locutam And this is exactly what makes Venus smile: Well, the goddess of erotic desire can hardly keep a straight face when the goddess of lawful marriage engineers a romp in a cave that is to be dressed up as a legitimate wedding though it will be anything but.
It is an insidious, even perverse sense of humour that Venus puts on display here — but perfectly in character.
The basic structure of the section is as follows: Indication of time — Preparation for the hunt and departure — Nameless attendants from Carthage — The youth and Massylian horsemen — Aeneas, including simile that compares him to Apollo, correlating with the Dido-Diana simile in Book 1. The perfect storm — Scattering of the companions — The encounter in the cave. In particular, Virgil elaborates on the preparation for the hunt the one and a half lines — Likewise, hunting in ancient thought is a sexually charged activity, but the erotics associated with hunting are of the violent, trangressing kind, as opposed to the civilized values that inform proper marital arrangements.
The intermingling of Carthaginians and Trojans raises the question whether Virgil uses the occasion to demarcate ethnic differences. But at least on the level of the entourage, similarities outweigh differences: At first sight the same does not quite apply to the same degree to the two leaders: As Syed points out: She is the subject of hardly a single active verb, excepting the ironically deponent progreditur in 4. For the most part, she is watched for 4. By contrast, Aeneas and Apollo to whom Aeneas is compared, are insistently active, they are the subjects of active verbs in the passage: Aeneas joins Dido 4.
In the simile, Apollo leaves Lycia 4. He renews dances 4. Just so, Aeneas, too, walks 4. But on inspection, the differentiation between Dido and Aeneas is perhaps less marked than Syed makes it out to be. It is true that Dido, throughout this passage, remains strangely out of focus and her agency marginalized. And there are subtle touches through which Virgil breaks down any stark opposition between the Trojan hero and the Phoenician queen: Also in light of the fact that we later meet Aeneas as if dressed for a Punic catwalk, with a cloak aflame in Phoenician gold and purple 4.
And as for syntax, just as Dido, Apollo, too, struts about in a deponent: The passage, then, seems studiouly ambiguous about the countervailing dynamics of assimilation and differentiation.