Who Do You Blame For The Tragedy Of Book IV Of The Aeneid?

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Lauren Sutton 13BMR Classical Essay

Who Do You Blame For The Tragedy Of Book IV Of The Aeneid?

In Book IV of The Aeneid a great tragedy occurs in the form of Queen Dido’s death. The Queen is deeply in love with Aeneas due to Aeneas’ mother, Venus, and his half brother, Cupid, ensnaring Dido’s heart in the poisonous web of love to prevent her from attacking and killing Aeneas and his men. During Aeneas’ stay Juno, Queen of the Gods and patron of Carthage, decides that she is going to lure brave Aeneas and the lovely Dido into a cave and unite them. Before this union Dido talks with her sister Anna about the vow she took never to love or marry another man. Anna persuades Dido to break this vow with Aeneas. After the vow is broken Dido stops looking after her city properly as she has become so enamoured with Aeneas and believes as her husband, as she now refers to him, “to hide her sins”, will do it for her. However Aeneas is destined to build another city in Italy where another wife awaits him and Mercury reminds him of this when the messenger God comes to tell him to leave. Unfortunately Dido hears of his planned departure by cruel Rumour before he can tell her himself and she is desolate. When he refuses to stay she makes an elaborate plan to commit suicide and at the end of book we see the smoke coming off the funeral pyre Dido built for herself, where she lay dead from the sword wound she gave herself.

The blame could quite easily be placed onto Aeneas’ shoulders and then have been done with, as many modern readers would do. However it is clear this is not what the writer of this master epic, Virgil, wants us to do. Virgil spends too long building up Aeneas’s character for example for his demonstration of loyalty in Book II where his father Anchises refuses to leave Troy, “…Here I lie and here I stay…” so Aeneas refuses to leave as well, “…Did you think I could run away and leave my father here? …Today we die. But not all of us shall die unavenged.” And the almost instinctual caring of his character, “Most of all did Aeneas, who loved his men, mourn to himself the loss of eager Orontes…”

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As Aeneas is his hero, Virgil would prefer it if the blame was laid elsewhere, for example at the door of The Queen of the Gods, Juno herself, Virgil’s divine villain. As Juno has hated the Trojans, now Romans, for many years because of an apple thrown into the middle of the wedding of Pelos and Thetis by Strife, she is an easy target. It could be said that if Juno had not been so caught up in her vile plots and malicious schemes and had considered Dido’s feelings while she was being used a pawn in Juno’s game to ...

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