Madness Gifted by Gods

  

 

Killed by fate and tortured by two goddesses, Dido, Queen of Carthage, was a mere steppingstone towards the building of Rome. Her tragic tale, recorded within the pages of Virgil’s Aeneid, was written by the cruel goddess of love and the selfish goddess of marriage, both of whom cared little for the mortal queen. Poisoned by Venus’ love, Dido forsook her vows and committed suicide, Carthage’s queen not in her own mind, but a pawn used by the gods to serve their own purposes.   

 

Before Aeneas reached Carthage, Venus planned to inflict the widowed queen with a sickly lover’s passion. Juno’s wrath had followed the Trojans to every city they came to, so Venus, in all her clever trickery, intended to offer up Dido as a potential wife for Aeneas to shift Juno’s attention (Virgil, 1.801-5). So, as Queen Dido of Carthage prepared a welcome feast for Aeneas and his men, Venus called for her son Eros so that he might inflict a burning love onto the heart of the queen. She ordered, “...you can breathe/ your secret fire into her, poison the queen/ and she will never know” (1.819-22). So as unsuspecting Dido held Eros in her arms, for he was disguised as Aeneas’ son, her body became riddled with Venus’ influence and her mind consumed with thoughts of the Trojan. The infectious nature of Venus’ lust filled trickery “...blots out the memory of Sychaeus bit by bit, / trying to seize with a fresh, living love/ a heart at rest for long—long numb to passion” (1.71.861-3). Soon Dido’s vows to her long dead husband began to falter, and in her weakened state the two warring goddesses would take from her all peace so that their divided purposes might be fulfilled. 

 

As Venus’ power sunk deeper into Dido’s heart, so did the queen’s sense of shame and guilt. Upon her husband, Sychaeus’, death, the widowed queen made a vow to never love another man again. Once the poison of Venus began to riddle her mind, Dido was driven mad by her unholy desires for Aeneas. The widowed queen cried out, “...almighty father blast me with one bolt to the shades.../before I dishonor you, my conscious, break your laws” (4.33-5). Conscience commanded Dido to remain faithful to her vows, but Venus’ whisperings began to dull the moral voice. In Dido’s frantic state, the kingdom she loved most suffered. The army no longer manned or fortified the walls. The kingdom Dido sought to prosper began to fall into ruin, yet its crumbling state is far from her mind (4.107-11). Seeing Dido’s desire for Aeneas, Juno sought after their marriage, going to Venus for her support with the union. The goddess of love, knowing her own power in Dido’s miserable passion and Aeneus’ eminent destiny, welcomed the offer with open arms (4.156-9). Through well planned coincidence, Dido and Aeneas hid away in the same cave, seeking shelter from a terrible storm. It is in that cave the Queen of Carthage’s fate is sealed, and “She no longer thinks to keep the affair a secret, / no, she calls it a marriage, / using the word to cloak her sense of guilt” (4.216-8). Even as Dido forgets her duties to Carthage, her vows still loom in the back of her infected mind, but with the will of two goddesses pushing her forward, the queen cannot keep her better judgment and is driven mad when Aeneas is called by his fate.  

 

As Venus hoped, destiny ordered Aeneas to depart from Carthage and sail to Italy, away from Carthage and its queen. As Aeneas prepared to leave, Dido, sick with the bitter feeling of abandonment, began to hear her late husband’s voice and was struck by nightmares of her Trojan lover, Venus’ passion driving her mad. Virgil writes, “Then/ terrified by her fate, tragic Dido prays for death, / sickened to see the vaulting sky above her” (4.564-7). As was the nature of Venus’ passion, the poison sunk deeper into Dido, leaving her with nothing but desperation to be released from the love she had for Aeneas. Once already Dido suffered the loss of a lover, her husband killed by her own brother, however she persevered through her grief so that his death might not be in vain. She cared for their kingdom, turning Carthage into a stronghold, and vowed to be devoted to Sychaeus, but the love she bore for Aeneas, tainted by his mother’s hand, quickly became a maddening prison from which she cannot escape. Soon the cage was made a grave when Mercury, messenger of the gods, ordered Aeneas to sail away under the darkness of night (4.690-712). As Aeneas was carried safely away by his ship, Venus gave no thought of the cursed queen despite her hand in the woman’s suffering. Dido shielded Aeneas from Juno and so her purpose was fulfilled. Only as the pitiful queen was a moment from death did Juno send Iris to release her spirit, “Since she was dying a death not fated or deserved, / no, tormented, before her day, in a blaze of passion...” (4.866-7). Venus, to protect her child, let her power burn Dido alive, while Juno, who gifted Carthage’s queen the illusion of a marriage did not spare her from an unjust fate. There is no true intervention from Olympus.  

 

How can a mortal defy the power of the gods? Dido, the tragic queen of Carthage, was tangled in a web of destiny and desires fed by Venus and Juno. Her heart had been caught by the two goddesses, and though neither drove the sword into Dido’s abdomen, it was their hands that lifted the queen onto the pyre. It was Venus and Juno, goddess of love and marriage, that drove Dido to madness and coerced her into breaking the vows she held as dearly as her husband.