4 - Dido's Furies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
Summary
Dido's mounting distress in aeneid 4 drives her to progressively wilder actions, and Vergil marks the escalation of her torment with similes of increasing violence. She grows from the pained bewilderment of a wounded animal early in the book,
uritur infelix Dido totaque vagatur
urbe furens, qualis coniecta cerva sagitta …
Unfortunate Dido burns and wanders senseless
throughout the city, like a doe struck by an arrow …
(68ff.)to the rage of a madwoman:
saevit inops animi totamque incensa per urbem
bacchatur, qualis commotis excita sacris
Thyias …
She raged uncontrollably and raved throughout
the city, inflamed like a Bacchant aroused by
the mad rites …
(300ff.)Eventually, not even sleep offers respite from her suffering. The narrative at that point takes us inside her mind to reveal even greater horrors in her dreams:
agit ipse furentem
in somnis ferus Aeneas, semperque relinqui
sola sibi, semper longam incomitata videtur
ire viam et Tyrios deserta quaerere terra,
Eumenidum veluti demens videt agmina Pentheus
et solem geminum et duplices se ostendere Thebas,
aut Agamemnonius scaenis agitatus Orestes,
armatam facibus matrem et serpentibus atris
cum fugit ultricesque sedent in limine Dirae.
Fierce Aeneas himself besets her
senseless in her dreams, and always left to herself alone,
always abandoned she imagines herself following a long
road and seeking her Tyrians in a deserted landscape,
just as mad Pentheus sees the band of Furies,
and twin suns and a double Thebes reveal themselves,
or as Agamemnon's son Orestes is hounded on the stage,
when heflees his mother, armed with torches and black snakes,
and the avenging Dirae cluster on the doorstep.
(465–73)- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Constructing Literature in the Roman Republic , pp. 115 - 143Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005