Dido’s Long Dying - Ricerca sull'intelligenza artificiale specializzata al MIT

Dido’s Long Dying

Michael C. J. Putnam

. . . sic fata gradus evaserat altos,
semianimemque sinu germanam amplexa fovebat
cum gemitu atque atros siccabat veste cruores.
illa gravis oculos conata attollere rursus
de½cit; in½xum stridit sub pectore vulnus.
ter sese attollens cubitoque adnixa levavit,
ter revoluta toro est oculisque errantibus alto
quaesivit caelo lucem ingemuitque reperta.
Tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata dolorem
dif½cilisque obitus Irim demisit Olympo
quae luctantem animam nexosque resolveret artus.
nam quia nec fato merita nec morte peribat,
sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore,
nondum illi flavum Proserpina vertice crinem
abstulerat Stygioque caput damnaverat Orco.
ergo Iris croceis per caelum roscida pennis
mille trahens varios adverso sole colores
devolat et supra caput astitit. ‘hunc ego Diti
sacrum iussa fero teque isto corpore solvo’:
sic ait et dextra crinem secat, omnis et una
dilapsus calor atque in ventos vita recessit.

–Virgil, Aeneid, book 4: lines 685–705

MICHAEL C. J. PUTNAM, a Fellow
of the American Academy since
1996, is the W. Duncan MacMillan II
Professor of Classics and Professor
of Comparative Literature, Emeri-
tus, at Brown University. His books
include The Humanness of Heroes:
Studies in the Conclusion of Virgil’s
“Aeneid” (2011) and A Companion
to Virgil’s “Aeneid” and its Tradition
(edited with Joseph Farrell, 2010).
He has recently translated Jacopo
Sannazaro: The Latin Poetry (2009)
and The Complete Poems of Tibullus
(with Rodney G. Dennis, 2012).

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Dido’s
Long Dying

This said, she [Anna] mounts the pile with

eager haste,

And in her arms the gasping Queen

embraced;

Her temples chafed, and her own

garments tore

To stanch the streaming blood and

cleanse the gore.

Thrice oped her heavy eyes and saw the light,
But having found it, sickened at the sight,
And closed her lids at last in endless night.
Then Juno, grieving that she should sustain
A death so lingering and so full of pain,
Sent Iris down to free her from the strife
Of labouring nature and dissolve her life.
For since she died, not doomed by

Heaven’s decree,

Of her own crime, but human casualty
And rage of love, that plunged her in despair,
The sisters had not cut the topmost hair
Which Proserpine and they can only know,
Nor made her sacred to the shades below.
Downward the various goddess took

her flight,

And drew a thousand colours from the light;
Then stood above the dying lover’s head,
And said, “I thus devote thee to the dead:
This offering to the infernal gods I bear.”
Thus while she spoke she cut the fatal hair,
The struggling soul was loosed, and life

dissolved in air.

–English translation of Virgil,

by John Dryden (1697)

In handbooks devoted to the history of

Western literature, Virgil’s Aeneid is usually
bracketed between Homer’s two master-
pieces, the Iliad and the Odyssey, E
Dante’s Divina Comedia as a milestone in
the development of the epic. It is the
Latin bridge between the literature of

ancient Greece and the evolution of ver-
nacular exemplars of the genre in late-
medieval and Renaissance Italy and be –
yond. From there we move, in English,
from the work of Milton, Wordsworth,
Tennyson, and Hardy, among others, A
Derek Walcott’s splendid Omeros, Quale,
for twenty-½rst-century readers, brings to
completion a millennial cycle of accom-
plishments in the form.

What Virgil adds to Homer could be
briefly put as an expanded sense of his-
torical development, of ethnic and political
diversity, and of the ethics expected to be
emulated by the powerful ½gures destined
to be the major protagonists in Rome’s
march to empire. Our poet extends the
Homeric prototypes so that we have a
novel mixture of the Iliad, with its battling
before the walls of Troy, and the Odyssey,
an adventure-½lled journey of return to
island home and family. As an amalgam –
ation, the Aeneid in fact draws throughout
its full course on both earlier epics to
fashion its own particular version of a
voyage of discovery, from Troy in ruins to
the shores of Italy, to the site of Rome, E
to the golden age of Augustus–in the far
distance for the poem’s chief protagonist,
Aeneas, but contemporary for Virgil and
his readers.

As the hero pursues his fated path, we
follow a route dotted by extraordinary
occurrences, such as his dalliance with
Dido, or his venture into the Underworld,
with the Cumaean Sibyl as guide, to visit
his father and learn something of what lies
ahead for himself and for his progeny, con
their unprecedented sweep of achieve –
ments projected through time. Homer has
little that suggests this notion of a thou-
sand year development, of a fated progress
that ends with one of the West’s grandest
cultural statements.

Nor does Homer more than suggest the
patterns of behavior open to a hero who
bears the spiritual burden of Rome’s fu –

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ture greatness while he literally carries his
father on his shoulders and leads his son
by the hand out of the smoldering remains
of Troy. A major aspect of the ethics that
should dictate how to use the omnipotence
that follows in the aftermath of victorious
conquest is put to Aeneas by his father,
Anchises, at the end of their meeting in
the land of the dead. Apostrophizing him
as Romane, and therefore as prototype
and paragon of his future race, he outlines
by précis the nub of what Rome’s greatest
talent will accomplish. It will be not for
achievements in bronze or stone sculp-
ture, not for skill at oratory or in as tronomy
that his people will boast in due course.
Roman artistry lies elsewhere:

tu regere imperio populos, Romane,

memento

(hae tibi erunt artes), pacique imponere

morem,

parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.

(Aeneid, book 6: lines 851–853)

Remember, Roman, to rule peoples with
might (these will be your arts), to impose
[upon them] a custom for peace, to spare the
humbled and war down the proud.1

In other words, Roman aesthetic or intel-
lectual accomplishment will not lie in tan –
gible works of art, or even in rhetoric’s
persuasive abilities or in the authority
that derives from cataloguing the heavens.
It will come from something both less
and more tangible: from a dynamic form
of political astuteness dedicated especially
to a morality of restraint in dealing with
those vulnerable to a conqueror’s force.

In the verses before addressing these ab –
stract dicta to his son, Anchises calls our
attention to a concrete instance where
sparing the subjugated should be exem-
plary in future Roman behavior. In the pa –
rade of Roman greats whose ghosts know –
ing father catalogues for ignorant son, IL
patriarch in conclusion apostrophizes

two, Caesar and Pompey, father-in-law and
son-in-law, who challenge each other in
the penultimate phase of the lengthy civil
war that preceded the Augustan peace.
The prayer, addressed speci½cally to Cae-
sar whom the myth of the Julian gens
claimed as Anchises’s linear descendant,
asks him to practice moderation in pur-
suit of war, which is to say, in practical
terms, to spare by ridding himself of the
weapons that the victor might be tempted
to misuse. Restraint seems particularly im –
perative when brother is ½ghting brother
and when the fatherland (patria), IL
abstract body politic that protects all, is the
ultimate victim. In actuality, this period
of ½ghting only ended when ½rst Pompey
and then Caesar were murdered.

Instances of moderation dot the epic’s
testo. In book 2, Venus prevents angry
Aeneas from killing Helen in revenge for
the suffering she has caused, and in book 9,
Apollo orders Aeneas’s son, Ascanius/
Iulus, to forbear from further slaughter lest
he bring retaliation in turn upon himself.
Ma, in this context, the example that most
troubles the reader, with purpose on Vir-
gil’s part, is the very conclusion of the
poem, where Aeneas, “set aflame by furies
and terrifying in his anger,” kills his sup-
pliant opponent, Turnus, who is on his
knees, hand outstretched, craving mercy.
None is forthcoming.2
With this background in mind, I would

like to turn to the speci½c event in the
Aeneid that has had the deepest effect on
later artists, namely the death of Dido, A
whom Virgil devotes the fourth book of
his poem. Other individual scenes in the
epic have captured the imaginations of
future generations–I think, for instance,
of Aeneas and the Sibyl, or of Turnus’s
death–but none has moved readers as
deeply and consistently as the sequence
of occurrences associated with the love
between Trojan prince and Carthaginian

Michael
C. J.
Putnam

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

101

Dido’s
Long Dying

queen, events that culminate in her sui-
cide. The story of Dido has exerted a pro-
found influence on Western literature,
from Virgil’s younger contemporary Ovid,
in the seventh of his Heroides, to the re –
cent poetry of Louise Glück. Its potency
is felt in music, in masterpieces such as
Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Hector
Berlioz’s Les Troyens. And various scenes
from book 4 have elicited powerful depic-
tions from painters as diverse as Claude
Lorrain, Tiepolo, Reynolds, and Turner.

The paradox remains that the tragedy as
it evolves is built on Aeneas’s forced re –
nunciation of private passion in order to
embrace the impersonal destiny that fate
has cast his way. The ending of the poem
suggests that the titular hero could act
quite differently from how he behaves to –
ward Dido. From one angle of interpreta-
zione, the poem’s conclusion is discomfort-
ing because Aeneas gives in to personal
emotion when he should least do so, Quale
is to say, at a crucial turn of events where
he should function as a model of forbear-
ance and where Virgil’s text itself, at its
½nale and climax, should most serve a di –
dactic purpose, for us as well as for its ini-
tial readers. We leave the poem having just
witnessed, for a ½nal time, how the spe –
ci½cs of human emotionality are ever at
odds with more general, idealizing aspi-
rations. We hope for a cathartic display of
mercy through an act of pardon, a scenario
similar to the conclusion of Mozart’s Le
Nozze di Figaro. Virgil fails to gratify our
wishes, leaving us for contemplation only
a manifestation of rage leading to a violent
killing. His lesson reinforces a constant
in the chronicle of human history, Quello
revenge regularly breeds further revenge.
Though in book 4 Aeneas suppresses his
feelings in favor of an impersonal calling,
Dido, by contrast, turns her own deep sen –
sibility ½rst verbally against her abscond-
ing lover, then physically against herself
as she resorts to suicide, so as to end all

feeling. It is in projecting her road to death
that Virgil’s virtuosity is most apparent.
Here, his text has had its profoundest in –
fluence on later artists, and it is where I
felt its power most when I ½rst read the
poem’s twelve books in Latin as an un –
dergraduate in college. I would like to de –
vote the remainder of this essay to watch-
ing closely a few of the ways by which the
text works its magic upon us. I am inter-
ested in particular in the means by which
the poet extends the time-span of Dido’s
suffering so as gradually to draw the reader
into close sympathy with her circum-
stances. There is no better way to trace a
master poet’s maneuvers than by looking
intently at his words and their deployment.
Here, as regularly, only a close examina-
tion of the original language will do jus-
tice to the artist’s craft and inventiveness.

Let us begin as we ½nd Dido and Aeneas

sharing a banquet she has prepared for her
royal guest:

nec non et vario noctem sermone trahebat
infelix Dido longumque bibebat amorem, . . .

(1:748–749)

Ill-fated Dido also was stretching out the
night with varied conversation and drinking
in love at length . . .

As we turn from literal drinking to meta –
phoric, we move from wine to the im –
plicit poison her love for Aeneas por-
tends. The double use of the imperfect
tense not only implies temporal continuity,
the echo of trahebat in bibebat also connects
the words themselves with love’s length-
ening over time. And indeed, as the queen
listens to the tale of her guest’s adventures
during and after the fall of Troy, a recita-
tion that takes up the epic’s second and
third books, her love only deepens.

As we reach book 4 and return to the
narrative proper, Virgil changes the meta –
phor from poison to wound and flame,

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while still reminding us of time’s extent
as a marked feature of his presentation:

At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura
vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni.

(4:1–2)

But the queen, for a long time now wounded
with grievous suffering, nourishes the
wound with her veins and is the prey of
hidden ½re.

But it is only at lines 169 A 172, with an
authorial intervention in the narrative,
that we begin to realize to the full Virgil’s
intent of ½guratively dilating the duration
of the queen’s agony:

ille dies primus leti primusque malorum
causa fuit; neque enim specie famave

movetur

nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem:
coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine

culpam. (4:169–172)

That was the ½rst day of death and the ½rst
to be the source of evil; for Dido is not
moved by appearance or repute nor does
she now ponder a hidden love. She calls it
marriage and with this label veils her blame.

The demonstrative hoc brings home the
fact that the narrator is commenting on
the action, presenting its meaning directly
to us, but it is especially the initial phrase,
ille dies primus leti, that captures our atten-
tion as we follow out Dido’s emotional his –
tory to its conclusion. One of our ½nest
Virgilian scholars, Roland Austin, mini-
mizes the effect of primus here by making
it adverbial (he translates: “That day in the
beginning was the cause of death, Quello
day in the beginning was the cause of sor-
row”).3 But such a reading tends to di –
minish the horror of Virgil’s implication
that Dido’s dying takes place over a stretch
of time. We have been prepared for this
by the earlier metaphoric implications of
poison, wound, and ½re. We are now wit-

nessing the commencement of the death
that will ultimately come about from their
imminence.

As the plot progresses, Virgil uses ½g –
uration regularly to draw the reader into
Dido’s emotional world. Let me offer one
salient example. At line 401, the narrator,
in an unusual gesture within what is ordi-
narily third-person delivery, addresses us
in the second person. We are asked in our
mind’s eye, as individual students of Vir-
gil’s text, to imagine beholding the Trojans
as they flee Carthage:

migrantis cernas totaque ex urbe ruentis: . . .

you might observe them moving away and
hurrying from the whole city.

E, with only the intervention of a simile,
that “you” shortly becomes Dido herself:

quis tibi tum, Dido, cernenti talia sensus,
quosve dabas gemitus, cum litora fervere late
prospiceres arce ex summa, totumque

videres

misceri ante oculos tantis clamoribus

aequor! (4:408–411)

What feelings were yours then, Dido, ob –
serving such things, or what groans did you
keep uttering when you looked out from the
top of the citadel at the beach swarming far
and wide, and saw before your eyes the
whole sea swirling with such great shouts!

The apostrophe to Dido makes her present
before our eyes. By the magic of ½guration
we are at Carthage, watching her as she
watches the Trojans departing. We hear
the noise (“such great shouts”) that she
apprehends. But by the focused repeti-
tion of cernas in cernenti, Virgil would have
us for a brief stretch of time actually
become the grieving lover as she views
Aeneas and his colleagues set sail on their
way to Rome. It is hard to imagine great
sympathy being elicited more magisteri-
ally by verbal means.

Michael
C. J.
Putnam

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143 (1) Inverno 2014

103

Dido’s
Long Dying

Ma, if we have been witnessing her death

over the length of four books of an epic,
Dido’s actual moment of dying is itself
also powerfully protracted in its exposi-
zione. Take the word vulnus (wound), for
instance. It occurs in the singular earlier
in book 4 at lines 2 E 67, as metaphor
for her love’s destructive aspect. When
she actually stabs herself with Aeneas’s
sword on her funeral pyre, Virgil turns
singular to plural (vulnera [4:683]). Literal
wounds have now been added to a single,
metaphorical hurt, forcing us to contem-
plate the arc of this very development as
one type of suffering leads to, and is piled
upon, another during the approach of
death.

Virgil employs a complementary tech-
nique shortly after as the goddess Juno at
last frees her suffering devotee from the
body’s trammels:

Tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata

dolorem

dif½cilisque obitus Irim demisit Olympo
quae luctantem animam nexosque
resolveret artus. (4:693–695)

Then almighty Juno, taking pity on her long
grief and dif½cult dying sent Iris down from
Olympus to undo her struggling spirit and
entangled limbs.

Let me point out two details in this ex –
traordinary resolution of life into death.
The ½rst is the echo of longum amorem,
whose poison we have seen Dido drink in
book 1 when the banquet’s literal wine
becomes the venom of destructive, ex –
tensive passion. Long love now yields
place to longum dolorem, the grief brought
about by unreciprocated passion over time
that both complements and then becomes
the pain of a prolonged demise. We have
followed this metamorphosis from book
1 to the end of book 4, engaging with the
anguish of the queen during the transmu-
tation of metaphoric wound into literal.

A second detail is the striking phrase
dif½cilis obitus. It has been a subject of de –
bate by students of Virgil as to why the
poet chooses to use a plural, “dif½cult
deaths,” instead of the more straightfor-
ward singular to describe Dido’s passing.
In his commentary on the phrase, Austin
feels that the plural here may be “‘inten-
sive’, marking the slow agony of Dido’s
death, the tortured moments one by one,"
but then underestimates the force of his
insight as “highly subjective.”4 Surely,
Tuttavia, he is absolutely correct and his
judgment should be expanded. Through
a single word we endure the ½nal minutes
of Dido’s drawn-out passage from life to
death, hurt by hurt, grief by grief, con
mental pain combined with physical in a
concatenation of suffering.

But Dido’s ½nal instants are but part of

the larger history of dying. Her death
began for the reader long ago, with the
poisoned draught of love and with ille dies
primus leti, the day when the lovers con-
summate their desire. In the case of Dido,
death is implicit in love and marks its
beginning. And it is a sign of Virgil’s vir-
tuosity not only to spread this aspect of
her tale out over narrative time, but also
to give it particular concentration at the
actual moment of her demise, dove il
plural obitus implies a multitude of deaths
both now and in the past.

Her deaths stay with us throughout the
rest of the poem.5 When Aeneas meets
Dido’s ghost in the Underworld, it is of
her dolor (6:464) at his departure that his
words tell. Or, for another example, Virgil
opens the poem’s eleventh book by re –
peating a line from book 4 that introduces
the tragic hunt and storm:

Oceanum interea surgens Aurora reliquit: . . .

(4:129)

Meanwhile the rising Dawn had left the
Ocean . . .

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This repetition is tantamount to advising
the reader that he should sense a connec-
tion between Dido’s passing and the bur-
geoning war in Latium. The poet suggests
a reason for such a link some seventy
lines later, when Aeneas prepares the
body of the dead youth Pallas for burial:

tum geminas vestis auroque ostroque rigentis
extulit Aeneas, quas illi laeta laborum
ipsa suis quondam manibus Sidonia Dido
fecerat et tenui telas discreverat auro.
harum unam iuveni supremum maestus

honorem

induit arsurasque comas obnubit amictu.

(11:72–77)

Then Aeneas took out twin clothes, stiff
with gold and purple, which Dido of Sidon,
happy with her efforts, had herself once
made for him with her own hands and had
interspersed the texture with gold. In sad-
ness with one of these, as a ½nal honor, he
clothes the youth and veils his locks, soon
to burn, with the shroud.

The reader is left to surmise why Dido is
so prominently recalled to memory be –
fore the funeral of Aeneas’s young pro-
tégé. But Virgil implies at least one
answer at the very end of the poem. There
we learn that the hero’s dolor, his grief
and resentment at the death of Pallas, È
what ½nally spurs him to kill Turnus, his
suppliant antagonist who had earlier
killed the youth in hand-to-hand combat.
Passion is again the spur to action, even
against a humbled foe. The chief differ-
ence with the death of Dido is that now
the hero himself kills, rather than simply
serving as the indirect cause of suicide.

E, ½nally, there is Turnus himself.
His name initiates the epic’s ½nal, longest
book, just as the departure of his life to
the shades brings it to a conclusion. Lui,
not Aeneas, claims the poetry’s cycle. A
the opening, Virgil brings him before us
with a startling simile that likens him to a

lion stricken by hunters, one of whom is
called a latro, a robber. I quote the initial
lines of the comparison:

Michael
C. J.
Putnam

. . . Poenorum qualis in arvis
saucius ille gravi venantum vulnere pectus
tum demum movet arma leo, . . . (12:4–6)

. . . just as in the ½elds of the Poeni that lion,
wounded in his chest by hunters’ grievous
wound, then at last advances to battle . . .

The demonstrative ille points our eye at
this special animal, and the particularity
continues in several other ways.6 The
lion is placed in the territory of the
Carthaginians (Poeni). The creature’s
uniqueness becomes still more distinc-
tive by means of the poet’s careful remi-
niscence of the opening lines of book 4,
quoted earlier:

At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura
vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni.

This is no ordinary human lion whose
habitat is Carthage, but one who stands
as direct surrogate for Dido. The epic’s
½nal book, as we have seen, begins and
ends with Turnus, not with the titular hero.
It also carefully imitates the progress we
have traced in book 4 from metaphorical
to literal wound. There, Dido endures
both the pain of unrequited love and the
self-inflicted wound of her suicide. In
book 12, Aeneas engenders the ½gurative
hurt by robbing Turnus of Lavinia, A
whom he considers himself betrothed.
He also perpetrates the ½nal wounding of
Turnus as the epic comes to its dramatic,
unrelieved conclusion. So Dido’s long
dying continues after her own death in
book 4, carefully extended by the poet’s
genius. We are reminded literally of it in
book 6, when Aeneas meets her ghost,
“Phoenician Dido with her wound still
fresh” (Phoenissa recens a vulnere Dido
[6:450]). Ma, as we have seen, her presence
symbolically complements the deaths of

143 (1) Inverno 2014

105

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Dido’s
Long Dying

both Pallas and Turnus, which are in turn
strategically intertwined.

So the influence of Dido permeates the
action of the epic long after her own pass-
ing and until the very moment of its con-
clusion. It is this influence that has
reached out to all sensitive readers of the
poem and has made its mark on literature
and the ½ne arts ever since. There is no
better way to experience her hurt over
the imagination’s time than by listening

to her dying words as conveyed by com-
manding composers like Purcell and
Berlioz, the latter a lover of Virgil from
his youth. In “When I am laid, am laid, In
earth” and in “Ah, je vais mourir,” music’s
extent in briefer, more trenchant com-
pass, movingly echoes the sorrow that
Virgil, over a stretch of epic narrative, ha
so brilliantly conveyed to us in perhaps
the most affecting portrayal of his ½nal
masterpiece.

endnotes
1 This and all subsequent Aeneid translations, unless otherwise noted, by the author.
2 As he prepares to kill Turnus, Aeneas is furiis accensus et ira / terribilis (“set aflame by furies
and terrifying in his anger” [Aeneid, book 12: lines 946–947]). The language deliberately
recalls two moments in book 4. In the ½rst, Dido describes herself before her suicide: heu
furiis incensa feror (“Alas, I am borne along, set a½re by furies” [4:376]). On the second occasion,
as we have seen, the narrator remarks that, as she prepared for the moment of self-slaughter,
she was subito . . . accensa furore (literally: “set aflame by sudden fury” [4:697]). In the end,
the poet has Aeneas emulate Dido rather than Anchises by choosing passion over self-control,
immediate human feeling over the restraint asked of Rome to come.

3 R. G. Austin, ed., P. Vergili Maronis: Aeneidos: Liber Quartus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955),
69 (on Aeneid, 4:169F). Dido’s delay before leaving her room to share in the day’s hunt is one
of several great moments of hesitation that dot the epic (cunctantem [4:133]). We think also
of the golden bough’s reluctance to be plucked by Aeneas (6:211) and of the hero’s own
moment of pause before killing Turnus (12:940). Dido’s delay in its own way further
stretches out the duration of her dying.

4 Ibid., 199 (on Aeneid, 4:694).
5 Damien Nelis rightly pointed out to me that the “sad foreboding” (triste augurium [5:7]),
which the departing Trojans sense as they look back at the flames emanating from Carthage,
suggests that we will often return to thoughts of Dido and her death as the epic progresses.
6 The term deictic is appropriately applied to ille by T. E. Page in his comment on the word.
See T. E. Page, ed., The Aeneid of Virgil: Books VII–XII (London: Macmillan, 1929), 413 (SU
Aeneid, 12:5).

106

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Scienze

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