When Dido Rewrites Vergil

The most significant difference between Dido and the other heroines is that Ovid did not draw from Greek models for the construction of this character (and if there were Greek models, these do not represent his principal sources).¹ Ovid’s most important and somehow disturbing model was Vergil’s Aeneid, the Roman national epic. When focusing on Dido, Ovid must have been aware that he had to consider, and enter into conversation with, Vergil’s depiction of Dido. Accordingly, scholars have generally interpreted Ovid’s epistle as an actual challenge to Vergil and, in most cases, decreed Vergil the victorious poet.² In other more positive judgments, Ovid has been said to play with Vergil’s epic through irony and ambiguity, thereby establishing an intertextual relationship with his model, to subvert its message.³ In other words, Ovid’s heroine has been interpreted as an alternative version of Vergil’s Dido, and has been said to be empowered to subjectively tell her side of the story.⁴ Therefore, the reader of Heroides 7 is expected to bear in mind Dido’s portrayal in Vergil: Vergil’s Aeneid is a prerequisite for fully understanding Heroides 7.⁵

Building on this idea of a dialogue with Vergil’s epic, this chapter shows that (Ovid’s) Dido does not simply approach the Aeneid in terms of a challenge, nor is she preoccupied with the weight of the Vergilian model. By contrast, Dido’s epistle is complementary to Vergil’s epic and establishes a dialogue with its model, not to deconstruct it, but to enrich its meaning and construct a new version of its main character and authorial persona.⁶ By handling Vergil’s text as an “intertext,” and thus incorporating it into her writing, Dido fills in its gaps: her potential pregnancy probably represents the most significant and evident manipulation of the Vergilian model.⁷ To shed light on the Ovidian heroine’s reinvention of the Aeneid, I will examine certain aspects of Vergil’s Dido that are relevant to my argument, before moving on to a close reading of Heroides 7.

In Aeneid 1, Dido is presented as a powerful ruler (see dux femina facti, 1.364),⁸ and Carthage (Dido’s city) is accordingly depicted as a sort of geographic alterity with respect to Rome.⁹ The African city is ruled by a queen, instead of a male king; Juno, rather than Jupiter, is worshipped as the predominant deity;¹⁰ and when Aeneas meets Dido, her status appears to be superior to that of the hero, who asks her for refuge and help (see 1.586–642). Beyond recalling the meeting between Ulysses and Nausicaa at Odyssey 6.110–197, this episode also shows a reversal of traditional gender roles:¹¹ the male hero, Aeneas, finds himself in the weaker and more dangerous position; he is saved by a woman, who rules an entire city and has taken on male tasks and roles; finally, Dido shows clemency, like an actual powerful king.

Moving on to book 4, the book of the Aeneid most relevant to Heroides 7, it has been stated that Dido’s falling in love with Aeneas (see “uritur infelix Dido,” The unfortunate Dido is inflamed with love; 68) seemingly results in her losing her status as a heroic (male) ruler, as well as her dignitas.¹² The loss of her reputation as univira (a woman who has had only one husband) and the departure from her quasi-Roman pudicitia (“modesty”), which are determined by her betrayal of the memory of her husband, Sychaeus, change Dido into an elegiac lover and reduce her heroic stature.¹³ This heroic stature is somehow restored through her suicide, which places the heroine on the same level as other tragic heroes who perform self-murder. In this respect, Dido has rightfully been said to be a tragic heroine within an epic frame (namely, the Vergilian poem).¹⁴ This generic interplay reflects the length and complexity of Dido’s narrative in Aeneid 4, which starts with Dido falling in love and assuming that her sexual intercourse with Aeneas functions as an actual Roman marriage (see 4.124–128, 165–172; also 307–308: “nec te noster amor nec te data dextera quondam / nec moritura tenet crudeli funere Dido,” Does neither our love hold you, nor the right hand once given, nor the doom of a cruel death for Dido? 316: “per conubia nostra, per inceptos hymenaeos,” by our marriage, by the nuptial rites begun), and ends with the heroine’s suicide and the despair of her sister Anna (651–705).¹⁵ For the sake of my argument, it seems particularly beneficial to focus on two aspects of this book: Dido’s potential maternity and her suicide.

After accusing Aeneas of having deceived her (4.305–306),¹⁶ Dido tries to convince him not to abandon her but to stay in Carthage by mentioning, among other reasons, the lack of a parvulus … Aeneas (“little Aeneas”) to comfort her following the departure of his father.¹⁷

Dido’s reference to a potential child is significant in many respects. First, for political reasons, since Aeneas’s child would contribute to reinforcing Dido’s legitimacy as the ruler of Carthage, as it would ensure the continuation of her dynasty.¹⁸ By contrast, Dido’s power is now in danger precisely because of her love story with Aeneas, which lowers her prestige as a queen (see the references to the jealousy and threats of the native kings at 4.196–218; also 4.325–326).¹⁹ However, the reference to a potential child goes beyond Dido’s political legitimation. As has been correctly noted by Mairéad McAuley, Dido’s desire for a “little Aeneas” who could remind her of his father, and make up for his absence, has an incestuous undertone, in addition to articulating the frustration of Dido and Aeneas’s relationship.²⁰ The allusion to Dido’s incestuous desire for her potential son, which parallels the incestuous connotation of the first meeting between Aeneas and his mother, Venus (see Aen. 1.305–401), establishes a thematic link between Dido and Phaedra, whom we encountered in Heroides 4 trying to seduce her stepson.

Moreover, Dido’s depiction of a potential son from Aeneas as a partial replacement for Aeneas himself has implications concerning her agency as a female character. Remarkably, in both Aeneid 4 and Heroides 7, the references to Dido’s offspring are gendered as masculine, as though the heroine expects that the child she could have from Aeneas would necessarily be a son. If we look at Dido’s hopes for a male child through the lens of modern theory, the specific desire for a son can be interpreted as Dido’s abstract and tentative projection into the androcentric world.²¹ A male child would allow Dido to enter the Lacanian Symbolic realm and align herself with patriarchal norms, whereas the lack of a child prevents this process of integration, so that Dido remains excluded and alienated from the patriarchal frame and, more particularly, from the Roman universe. At the same time, this exclusion also means that Dido is not perceived as a product of male discourse, as the “other of the Same,” but as an alternative, enigmatic, unknown, and therefore potentially dangerous subject.²² On the one hand, the lack of a son confirms Dido’s otherness and displacement, as well as inappropriateness for Aeneas; on the other hand, a son would have enabled Dido to escape the eternal circularity of the exotic Carthage and to actively enter the linear and historical time of the Roman world, as an uxor and a mater.²³ In contrast to what one may expect, in the Aeneid, it is the absence of a procreative and generative process (which quintessentially articulates the repetitive mechanism of perpetuation of species) that keeps Dido bound to an eternal circularity and the continuous return to her previous life and relationship with Sychaeus. This process of continuous return is sanctioned, within the Vergilian poem, by Dido’s suicide.

The description of the heroine’s suicide, particularly the way in which Dido arranges a pyre and dedicates her act to the ashes of Sychaeus, recalls a sacrificial ritual (see 504–521, 630–666). According to certain views, Dido’s suicide is not only characterized by a religious and sacral atmosphere, but also makes her appear as an actual sacrificial victim.²⁴ This nuance creates a link between Dido and other well-known female victims within classical literature, such as Iphigenia and Polyxena, as well as recalling the other versions of Dido’s myth, where the heroine committed suicide to save her people.²⁵ From the perspective of a Roman-centered morality, Dido’s suicide may eventually represent the dissolution of a transgressing and threatening behavior, as well as the annihilation of a potentially dangerous character who has delayed and jeopardized Aeneas’s mission. In other words, the (self-)destruction of Dido within the narrative fiction articulates the cancellation of an “otherness,” namely, a dissonant attitude or custom with respect to Roman mentality and culture.²⁶ The Vergilian Dido sacrifices herself for the sake of Aeneas’s duty.

Being out of the narrative also means being eliminated from the teleological universe of the Aeneid and, accordingly, from the foundation of Rome. After Dido’s famous monologue featuring her threat against Aeneas’s future people (“exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor,” Arise from my ashes, unknown avenger; 625), the heroine decides to enact her suicide. However, before she does, she pronounces her last words, another curse on Aeneas.

Eventually, Dido throws herself on Aeneas’s sword, which was placed on top of the pyre (663–665), thereby accomplishing a highly symbolic act. By killing herself with a gift from Aeneas, the heroine attributes her death to him, not only as an indirect cause but also in terms of material agency, insofar as the sword translates into Aeneas’s responsibility for Dido’s death in actual terms and materializes the consequences of his departure as a proper murder.²⁷

Furthermore, the sword embeds an erotic connotation, since, as a phallic symbol, it alludes to sexual penetration and can therefore be interpreted as another metaphor for Dido and Aeneas’s intercourse.²⁸ This intercourse with Aeneas, both the actual and the metaphorical, is what has caused (symbolically and literally, as well as directly and indirectly) Dido’s death: in this scene, the literal level of the narration overlaps and is interwoven with the metaphorical one. In more Lacanian terms, Dido makes the signifier and the signified, the symbol and the sēma, coexist in the sword. Through this coexistence of metaphorical and concrete meanings, the sword entitles Dido to a heroic and virtuous death, because of its symbolic value as a weapon suiting honorable men, as well as soldiers and heroes.²⁹ By using the sword, therefore, Dido not only attributes her death to Aeneas but also restores her heroic and epic status, along with her male dignity, which she previously lost by falling in love with Aeneas. This heroic status will also continue to characterize Dido in her subsequent appearance as an umbra in book 6.

In the underworld, Aeneas encounters Dido concealed in the darkness (obscuram, 6.453), and starts speaking to her. After realizing that he was the main cause of Dido’s suicide, Aeneas apologizes (456–464) and emphasizes that he had to leave Dido against his own will (“invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi,” Unwillingly, my queen, I left your shore; 460).³⁰ With the roles reversed from book 4, Aeneas asks Dido to listen to him (465–466), but she looks at him with a fierce expression (et torva tuentem, 467), turns her face (“illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat,” She, turning away, kept her eyes fixed on the ground; 469),³¹ and walks into a nemus umbriferum (“shadowy forest”), where Sychaeus is waiting for her (473–474); seeing this, Aeneas begins to cry and goes away.³² On the one hand, Dido’s silence and attitude provide her with a heroic stature, which is also confirmed by the parallel with the Homeric, epic Ajax (see Od. 11.543–564). However, this scene leaves us with the image of a speechless Dido, who cannot (or is not willing to) find any words that have a place within the structure of the poem, or in the world of epic. Dido’s speechlessness in Aeneid 6 articulates the circularity of the depiction of this figure throughout the Vergilian epic, bringing us back to the starting point of her story, as well as reminding us of her powerful role (see Aen. 1.561–578).³³ This speechlessness, however, produces a lack, a hole, an absence within the poem, which is both textual and narrative.

While examining motherhood within the Aeneid, Mairéad McAuley remarks on “the difficulty of talking about Roman epic mothers without reproducing the essentializing and oppressive gender norms of the texts themselves.”³⁴ Yet, despite how mothers and women are sidelined in the epic tradition, a reading of the Aeneid through the filter of motherhood may lead to the emergence of different identities and voices. As an epic woman (and potential) mother, Dido, while offering “a further voice” in the Vergilian narrative, remains necessarily peripheral to the main, martial developments of the poem.³⁵ By contrast, the subjective space of Heroides 7 allows the elegiac Dido to reposition herself more centrally within her story. Silence and speechlessness characterize the end of Dido’s narrative in the Aeneid, but her voice is not silenced forever, as it is reproduced by (the Ovidian) Dido’s autobiographical narration, which gives continuous impulse to the narrative process.³⁶ Dido’s narrative, her text, seems to escape the control of the author; the small child, that is, the literary work, eludes the jurisdiction of its father (the writer).³⁷ The law of the Father (of the West, proverbially Vergil) is hence challenged by his own creation: a different ultor (“avenger”) will give voice to Dido, thereby filling the gaps of the Vergilian epic. The ultor is, in this case, the other Dido (of Her. 7), who, looking at herself in the (Vergilian) mirror, neither recognizes the contours of her image nor acknowledges the boundaries of that written text.³⁸ These boundaries will be expanded through a subjective rewriting that spreads and (to put it with Cixous’s words) “overflows,” eventually crystallizing in another author, time, and literary genre. This (re)writing is, at least to some extent, feminine.³⁹

(Ovid’s) Dido: To Be Continued

Heroides 7 is imagined as being written after (Vergil’s) Dido has discovered that Aeneas’s fleet is leaving (Aen. 4.397–411).⁴⁰ This passage precedes Dido’s dialogue with her sister Anna (4.416–436), where the heroine begs her to go to Aeneas and ask him for “idle time” (tempus inane, 433). Thus, Ovid’s epistle replaces Anna’s presumed verbal plea and may be seen as an actual letter handed by Dido to Anna, to be ultimately given to Aeneas. This idea seems to be supported by the last lines of Heroides 7, where Dido directly addresses her sister before committing suicide (191–194). Filling the gaps left by previous sources, or literally rewriting and recasting (parts of) the relevant mythical episodes, is an Ovidian strategy that we have already seen at work while discussing Deianira in Heroides 9 and Phaedra in Heroides 4. Like her fellow heroines, Dido not only reshapes her myth but re-creates her new identity as an elegiac (and tragic) character.⁴¹ Because of the weight of the tradition she bears, that is, her reputation as an epic character in the Aeneid, Ovid’s Dido is not concerned with providing a background for her story, instead beginning her epistle in medias res with the word sic,⁴² which is intended to link her text to previous facts and events.⁴³ The opening of Dido’s letter is characterized by a metaphor, where the heroine compares herself, or her poem/letter, to a swan.⁴⁴

This beginning has led some scholars to describe this epistle as Dido’s swan song, as it is supposed to contain the last words of the heroine, which are written right before she commits suicide (see also the epigraph in the last couplet of the epistle, at lines 195–196).⁴⁵ At the same time, this opening differs from most of the openings of other epistles, where the heroines usually introduce themselves through a formula, a periphrasis, or a reference to their own and/or their partner’s name or origin.⁴⁶ In this respect, it is notable that Heroides 7 does not reveal the identity of its author immediately, but there is a suspension in the indication and, accordingly, identification of the writer, as Dido mentions her name for the first time at line 7 (“certus es ire tamen miseramque relinquere Dido,” Are you resolved nonetheless to go, and to abandon wretched Dido? 7).⁴⁷ However, an educated reader would have probably been able to identify Dido as the author of this epistle a couple of lines before, at Heroides 7.5, where a reference is made to the lost fama (“reputation”), which is a widespread motif in Aeneid 4 (see, e.g., 4.173–197, 663–666) and marks Dido and Aeneas’s unfortunate relationship.⁴⁸ Yet this hint at the Vergilian Dido occurs only at line 5: Why does Dido delay the introduction of herself as the writer and author of the text? Why does she compare herself to the swan? What are the metapoetic implications of this metaphor?

This delay is consistent with the way Dido casts herself throughout the epistle, that is, as an auctor who is completely in control of her text and story, one who enjoys writing it and making it overcome its boundaries and expand in every direction.⁴⁹ Therefore, the delay in referring to herself is the earliest expression of Dido’s relationship with her writing, which is artistically refined, rhetorically elaborated, and characterized by irony and ambiguity.⁵⁰ The heroine enjoys the creation of the text and the way she can manipulate it.⁵¹ The opening in medias res, which suggests the insertion of Dido’s letter within a well-known narrative; the highly artistically refined metaphor of the swan (1–4); and the reference to her well-known Vergilian fama, which implies the educated readers’ foreknowledge of the story—all these elements suggest that the text, even more than its author, appears in the foreground at the start of this epistle and materializes itself as an actual, physical, and tangible presence (see lines 5–6, where Dido’s corpus, together with her fama and animus, is paralleled to her words, verba).⁵² The prominence of the text enhances Dido’s role as a highly ironic (and Ovidian) author.

Some lines later, the heroine refers to an alter amor and an altera Dido, thereby hinting at Aeneas’s future relationship with Lavinia, whom he will meet in Latium.⁵³

Even though Dido cannot be aware of Aeneas’s (future) relationship with Lavinia within the literary fiction, the Ovidian character, who has learned from Vergil’s Aeneid, is again playing with the Vergilian intertext, showing that she is more cunning and experienced than her epic counterpart. At line 18, however, Dido adds that the fides (18; here “pledge,” “guarantee”) given to this altera Dido will also be disregarded—something that does not seem to happen in the Aeneid. Beyond playing with an elegiac topos (the lack of fides of the beloved),⁵⁴ Dido, while alluding to the Aeneid, is also pointing out a possible, unexpected future scenario that differs from the implied and expected outcome of the story: the happy marriage between Aeneas and Lavinia.⁵⁵

In the Vergilian poem, Lavinia is often mentioned but does not play an active role.⁵⁶ Accordingly, the figure of Lavinia may be said to be a mere construction in the Aeneid, the telos that guides Aeneas throughout the poem. The marriage between Aeneas and Lavinia represents the start of a new dynasty, one that would eventually lead to the foundation of Rome. However, readers of the Aeneid can only imagine the outcome of the relationship between Lavinia and Aeneas.⁵⁷ In other words, Dido does not simply hint at Vergil’s poem, but is also somehow reshaping, challenging, and correcting it by implying that the events will not necessarily go as (knowledgeable) readers may expect. The omissions, the unspoken and unwritten contents of the Aeneid, can ultimately be deconstructed and reconstructed according to a different—elegiac and female—perspective.⁵⁸

At the same time, the iunctura of altera Dido (17) may also refer to another version of the same character, who departs from the authoritative model of the Vergilian Dido. By hinting at another version of herself, the heroine incorporates into her fictional persona the idea of a reproduction and proliferation of texts, stories, and characters intrinsic to a narration or storytelling, as well as to her permanence as a fictional character.⁵⁹ In other words, Aeneas will meet another, “a second Dido,” every time his story is (re)told. In future stories and generations, this story may change and its potential developments multiply, thereby presenting a different, more powerful version of the same character.⁶⁰ Equally, since the Ovidian Dido already represents an evolution from her Vergilian counterpart, the “second Dido” may also be read as Dido’s subtle reference to herself qua Heroidean Dido. By using the expression altera Dido, referring either to Lavinia or to “another” version of herself, whether present or future, the heroine stresses the power and autonomous agency of the text she is writing.

A similar agency of the text as a replacement or alternative version of the main (and most famous) source is suggested in the following lines, where the heroine rhetorically asks when Aeneas will be able to found “a city like Carthage” (instar Carthaginis urbem, 19) and look at his peoples from the citadel (20). Also in this case, Dido hints at the events that will allegedly happen, and are implied, in the Vergilian narrative but are not actually present, nor explicitly told, within the Aeneid. From Heroides 7, the Vergilian poem thus appears as a sort of Michelangelo’s “Non-Finito” (sculptures where human figures are carved as though they are struggling to free themselves from the rough marble piece), since the continuation of the story, characterized by a happy ending, is only implied but not told or openly narrated. In other words, the final product is drafted, but not wholly depicted or sculpted. The Aeneid’s (unfinished) narrative suggests that Dido may be right in doubting Aeneas’s mission concerning the foundation of a new, powerful city. As Romulus founded Rome much later than Aeneas, Dido’s achievements appear here much greater than what Aeneas will do later in the poem. Dido has built a great city, whereas Aeneas will go on to found a very small town, insignificant on its own terms. Through her minimization of Aeneas’s mission, Dido thus seems to overcome for a moment the boundaries of the elegiac genre, as well as the text that she is currently writing, in order to change and challenge the expected (but never fully recounted) end of the story in the epic poem, the Aeneid.

Changing the Past: Dido’s (Re)Construction of Reality

The quasi-subjective rewriting of her narrative in Heroides 7 allows Dido to recast her epic past, thus making Aeneas’s behavior toward her appear especially reproachable. At the same time, she incorporates Aeneas’s (either real or potential) children into the rhetorical manipulation of her literary past, as well as her relationship with Aeneas. At lines 23–32, the heroine recalls the stages of falling in love with Aeneas, while describing the symptoms of her still-present love for him.⁶¹

The word materia is a marked substantive within Ovid’s erotic poetry, and etymologically recalls the word mater, which also features in this passage (36).⁶² Aeneas’s love is illusory (35), as his character differs from the ingenium (“nature,” 36) of Venus (36)—his mother, indeed.⁶³ Certain lexical choices characterizing these two couplets (33–36) give Dido and Aeneas’s relationship a compelling elegiac aspect: see coepi … amorem (33); materiam curae … meae (34); fallor (35).⁶⁴ Since Dido’s unrequited love in these lines is depicted through stereotypically elegiac patterns, Aeneas cannot be said to actually contravene the rules of elegiac poetry by rejecting Dido’s love, because unrequited loves and unhappy relationships are very prominent patterns in elegy.

In Dido’s (autobiographical) narrative, however, Aeneas does break from the norms of elegy, insofar as he goes beyond its limits as a literary genre. By representing the quintessentially epic hero, and the epic conception of masculinity, Aeneas merges epic discourse with erotic poetry, letting the heroic elements penetrate elegy. In other words, “following Italy” (see Her. 7.10; Aen. 4.361), that is, pursuing his epic mission and thus relinquishing his beloved, is what causes Dido’s hostility toward Aeneas both as a fictional character (i.e., an abandoned woman) and as a writer of her epistle, since the entry of an epic component into the elegiac universe may disrupt her literary construction.⁶⁵ Concurrently, since the Heroides are an example of “Kreuzung der Gattungen,” the coexistence of various literary genres enriches, instead of undermining, the essence of these texts.⁶⁶ Just as rejected loves and unhappy relationships substantiate elegy, making it exist as a genre and as poetic production, so the mixture of literary genres, that is, the penetration of epic into elegy, gives birth to the text of the Heroides. By letting the disturbing content of Aeneas’s epic enter her elegiac epistle, Dido, as both a lover and a writer, plays with the intrinsic variety and inconsistency of both the genre (elegy) and specific literary work (the Heroides).

Enhancing the rhetorical nature of her discourse, the heroine depicts herself as a different character from her Vergilian counterpart to allegedly persuade Aeneas to remain with her. While Vergil’s Dido is extremely angry at Aeneas,⁶⁷ the Ovidian heroine seems, in most cases, to be almost merciful and forgiving.⁶⁸ This attitude emerges from certain passages within the epistle, such as lines 45–46, where Dido claims she is not worth Aeneas taking any risks for, if he is leaving so quickly to flee from her (dum me per freta longa fugis, “while flying from me over the wide seas,” 46). Beyond portraying a different version of Dido, these lines appear to be characterized by a high degree of irony and must accordingly be interpreted as the result of Dido’s rational construction of both the text and reality. By presenting herself as compassionate, as well as displaying calm and good sense, Dido certainly places herself in a good light (see also lines 61–72: e.g., 63, “vive, precor!” Live, I pray it!). At the same time, and more importantly, she is demonstrating that she is in control of her feelings and drives, as well as the construction of her subjective narration.

The construction of a compassionate Dido as a means to enhance her rhetorical strategies continues at lines 73–74 (“grande morae pretium tuta futura via est,” Your safe voyage will be great reward for waiting; 74), but her preoccupation with Aeneas’s destiny, companions, and family appears particularly developed from line 75 onward, when Dido mentions Ascanius, Aeneas’s son.⁶⁹ With a sharp rhetorical argument, Dido states that she is not so concerned about Aeneas but for his young son: “haec minus ut cures, puero parcatur Iulo!” (Even if you disregard these considerations, only let the little Iulus survive! 75). Through her reference to Aeneas’s son, Dido recalls the scene from Aeneid 1 where Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, was sent by Venus to the queen of Carthage to make her fall in love with Aeneas.⁷⁰ By suggesting that she is keen on putting Ascanius’s life before Aeneas’s, Dido presents herself as a proper Roman matrona, who is more concerned with the safety of her offspring than that of anyone else.⁷¹ Concurrently, by hinting at Ascanius as a replacement for his father, as well as a substitutive object, a fetish of Aeneas, the heroine seems to play with a certain incestuous frame already implied in the Vergilian episode.⁷² This incestuous connotation is strengthened by a reading of this reference to Ascanius vis-à-vis Heroides 4.113–126, where Phaedra emphasizes Theseus’s reproachable behavior toward both herself and Hippolytus to legitimate her incestuous desire for her stepson. While Dido’s attentions are openly addressed to Aeneas throughout Heroides 7, she is similar to Phaedra in that, at times, she seems to care more about her potential stepson (Ascanius) than about Aeneas. This connection between Dido’s preoccupation with Ascanius and Phaedra’s care for Hippolytus strengthens the allusions to a potential incestuous subtext in the relationship between Dido and her stepson.

Furthermore, in the following lines, Dido cunningly attributes the responsibility for Ascanius’s potential death to Aeneas, who already represents the reason for Dido’s prospective death, “te satis est titulum mortis habere meae” (It is enough for you to have the credit for my death; 76); the word titulus, which may suggest the frame of a “title” of honor or glory, is here ironically linked to the genitive mortis.⁷³ The heroine thus paints herself as an attentive mother, whereas Aeneas is depicted as an inconsiderate father, husband (of Creusa), and partner (of Dido).

By referring to Creusa through a periphrasis, formosi mater Iuli, Dido not only avoids mentioning Creusa’s name, but also mentions Aeneas’s son for the third time in a few lines (75, 77, 83), as well as linking to him an adjective recalling his beauty and, perhaps, his erotic appeal to her (formosus, 84).⁷⁴ Through these emphatic and repeated mentions of Aeneas’s child, Dido identifies herself with Creusa (Aeneas’s first wife) and, simultaneously, hints at her “unconscious” desire for Ascanius.⁷⁵ The authentic desire of motherhood and the mother’s drive toward Aeneas’s son as a love object seem to coexist within the heroine.⁷⁶

In the lines hitherto analyzed in this section, Dido appears to be characterized by certain tendencies that can be interpreted and further explained through the lens of modern feminist theory. First, by presenting her version of her new elegiac persona and events, Dido builds up a new story and manipulates the narration. Such a manipulation, as well as her rational and astute interplay with her Vergilian alter ego, leads to the construction of a new text, which alters Dido’s mythic “megatext.”⁷⁷ This alteration affects and modifies the meaning of the entire mythological episode concerning Dido (and Aeneas). Through the production of a subjective text, the heroine eventually departs from the (male-based) heroic narrative in which her story was inscribed, thereby imposing her perspective and surviving as a self-standing subject, instead of an object determined by an external discourse.⁷⁸

Furthermore, this intervention in the narration also contributes to Dido’s construction of her subjectivity and, accordingly, her motherhood. By showing her concerns for Ascanius, Dido presents herself as a suitable Roman mother, and matrona; at the same time, she alludes to the incestuous undertones that characterized the meeting between herself and Cupid, who was disguised as Ascanius in the Aeneid. This process of appropriation of Aeneas’s child, which will be further developed later within the epistle, expresses the heroine’s attempt to appropriate, and take control of, Aeneas’s future. Beyond being a result of the construction of women as “others” and their categorization as objects of discourse, maternity can also be the site of jouissance and a cause of empowerment for women, who through their maternal experience reinterpret the semiotics, that is, the language of reality.⁷⁹

In the case of Dido, besides this ambivalence, the “maternal” (feeling) brings about narcissism, as she sees in Ascanius (or the potential child she may have from Aeneas) a hypostasis of her subjectivity. Ascanius, in his function as a replacement of both Aeneas and an actual son, thus becomes for Dido the love object in which desire for Aeneas and desire for a child (as a reflection of herself) coexist. This desire for a son and the inclination to see herself as a mother are linked to Dido’s creation of both her text and reality. The lack of a son is amended by another kind of production, a literary one, through which the heroine shapes the present as an alternative and parallel reality for Aeneas’s and her own story. At the same time, the pleasure involved in the production of the text and her fictional story replaces, and is complementary to, an actual sexual object, of which Dido possesses only the imago (see line 35)—namely an image, a reflection, a phantom. In this respect, Robert Scholes’s words concerning the relationship between artistic creation and eroticism appear particularly instructive.

The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act. In saying this I do not mean merely to remind the reader of the connection between all art and the erotic in human nature. Nor do I intend simply to suggest an analogy between fiction and sex… . In the sophisticated forms of fiction, as in the sophisticated practice of sex, much of the art consists of delaying climax within the framework of desire in order to prolong the pleasurable act itself. When we look at fiction with respect to its form alone, we see a pattern of events designed to move toward climax and resolution, balanced by a counter-pattern of events designed to delay this very climax and resolution.⁸⁰

In Heroides 7, Dido’s desire for (a son from) Aeneas, which is the consequence of their sexual intercourse, overlaps with and changes into a desire for narration. Instead of producing a child, the sexual act produces a text: Dido’s letter.⁸¹ By reinterpreting the symbolic and linguistic meaning of sexual acts, and by subverting gender categories, masculinity and femininity, as well as social and cultural hierarchies, Dido manages to place herself in the position of the speaking subject. As a result, she changes her status as a narrated character into the reader and, accordingly, the author of her own story—and text. In semiotic terms, Dido simultaneously represents the receiver (the reader), the vehicle (as an Ovidian character), and ultimately the producer (the writer of the epistle) of a system of signs. In the shift from her function as a reader (of the Vergilian Dido, along with the previous literary tradition) to her role as author, the heroine reinterprets the sources from her own perspective and gives them a different meaning, thereby appropriating a subjective speech, language, and discourse, which are then hypostasized within the text she writes.⁸² The heroine’s reinterpretation of patriarchal discourse and appropriation of its meaning are accomplished through the construction of her text/writing as a substitutive body, which reflects both her feminine body and the projection of it into a new entity. In other words, Dido’s construction of her subjectivity is grounded and dependent on her (whether fictional, actual, or displaced) motherhood.

Rewriting the Future: The Birth of the Text

The previous sections explored Dido’s provocative engagement with her literary past and her role as an author (and a parent) of her poetic creation; in this section, the focus shifts to Dido’s references to her potential pregnancy, and its implication for her literary motherhood.

The adverb forsitan (“maybe”) at the beginning of line 133 implies that (Ovid’s) Dido is here ironically referring to the Vergilian intertext, since in Aeneid 4.328–329 the queen complains about the lack of a parvulus … Aeneas.⁸³ As mentioned, these references to a child from Aeneas may be read as an allusion to a fetishistic replacement of Dido’s love object, as well as her incestuous desire.⁸⁴ While still suggesting the possibility of real motherhood, in Heroides 7 Dido can be said to give birth to the text, the epistle itself,⁸⁵ which as we have seen replaces a potential child as a token of her authentication and active intervention in the narration.⁸⁶ The epistle changes the childless and speechless Dido at Aeneid 4.327–330 and 6.450–476 into a woman who is entitled to tell her side of the story.

Concurrently, if we postulate the existence of a female readership for the Heroides, Dido’s reference to a potential son from Aeneas might acquire further nuance in terms of readers’ response. From Donatus’s/Suetonius’s Vita Vergilii (Life of Vergil, 32), we learn that Octavia, Augustus’s sister, fainted after listening to the lines recounting the premature death of her son Marcellus (see Aen. 6.882–883).⁸⁷ Although that account cannot be considered historically accurate, it is significant that the commentator chose to describe maternal grief as an example of the reaction to the reading of the Aeneid.⁸⁸ What meaning would a Roman mother have given to Dido’s potential, and strongly desired, pregnancy? Surely, a child from Aeneas would have legitimated Dido’s status as Aeneas’s wife, because a child, particularly a male child, enhanced the status of women within Roman society (see above, in the introduction). The ambiguity determined by the adverb forsitan, however, leaves it up to readers to decide whether the Ovidian Dido should be interpreted as pregnant or not. By opening multiple interpretative avenues, Dido’s ambiguous reference to her potential pregnancy articulates her intervention in the reception, and accordingly formation, of her narrative.⁸⁹

Such an argument finds further evidence in the lines that follow, where Dido claims that a part of Aeneas (that is, a child from him) might be hidden in her own body: “parsque tui lateat corpore clausa meo” (134). On a literal level, this sentence refers to Dido’s pregnancy and the fetus enclosed in her body. The expression pars tui, moreover, enhances the idea of a coincidence of Aeneas and his (potential) child in a unique entity, as well as insisting on the concept that a son from Aeneas would represent the only possible replacement for the departure of the hero. Concurrently, insomuch as the phrasing of this line recalls certain famous passages that refer to the immortality of literary works (see, e.g., Hor. Carm. 3.30.6–7; Ov. Met. 15.875–879),⁹⁰pars tui may also allude to Dido’s (literary) account of Aeneas’s narrative, and to Aeneas as a mythological character. In this way, Dido’s body, which is said to encapsulate a part of Aeneas, symbolizes the heroine’s text and subjective storytelling. Dido’s letter, which functions as an inscription of her body, is therefore meant to perpetuate the memory of Aeneas’s and her own narrative, and to some extent (literary) life, despite the “death of its author”—to borrow a fortunate expression from Roland Barthes.⁹¹

The ambiguity implied in the equivalence “body of a child = body of the text” continues in the following couplet, where Dido imagines that if she were pregnant, her suicide would certainly also bring about the death of Aeneas’s child: “accedet fatis matris miserabilis infans” (135).⁹² Aeneas, therefore, has to be considered responsible for the death of his potential offspring: “et nondum nato funeris auctor eris” (And you will be responsible for the doom of your yet unborn child; 136). The word auctor can mean “person responsible/cause,” “parent (or ancestor),” and “author” (of a text, literary or artistic work). Therefore, Aeneas is both the auctor qua “person responsible” for his child’s death, and the auctor, or “father” of his (yet unborn) child.⁹³ These words of Dido help make clear how Aeneas’s departure jeopardizes the life of the heroine, along with her potential child. Concurrently, the noun auctor has a (meta)literary connotation, insofar as Aeneas is also the “author” of his yet unborn child’s doom. As a father, a responsible person, and an author, Aeneas can only cause his son’s death, whereas Dido, by burying “a part” of Aeneas in her body, preserves its (meta)literary existence. The body of Dido’s potential child overlaps with Dido’s body, and accordingly her literary production, namely, the text she is writing.

In the Aeneid, when Aeneas leaves Carthage, Dido loses the reason for her existence within the poem as well as her legitimation as a character (and indeed, she reappears only briefly in the underworld, as we mentioned above: see Aen. 6.450–476). In other words, Aeneas’s abandonment also leads to the cancellation and obliteration of Dido as a fictional character: without Aeneas, Dido’s story has no reason to continue existing within the Vergilian epos. In the Ovidian epistle, however, while implying her unavoidable destiny, the heroine simultaneously recasts the narrative of the Aeneid and keeps on writing her text, managing to perpetuate her existence. Although Dido’s suicide seems, inevitably, to end her (potential) child’s life, as well as her own, it also represents a necessary condition for the continuation of her story, which is transmitted to future generations.⁹⁴ In this respect, the heroine further adds that her child—indicated this time as “Ascanius’ brother” (frater … Iuli, 137)—will die together with his mother, and the same unfortunate destiny will lead them away together (138).⁹⁵ By referring to the death of Dido’s fetus, this couplet adapts the elegiac topos of the simultaneous death of two lovers who are meant to be buried together to the relationship between a mother and a son, thus furthering the incestuous undertone already implied in Dido’s references to Ascanius.⁹⁶ At the same time, the alleged death of the fetus articulates Dido’s correction of the words of her Vergilian Doppelgängerin, who complained about the lack—not the death—of a child from Aeneas. The heroine’s rewriting of, and challenge to, the Vergilian epos is what perpetuates Dido’s literary life. If Dido’s potential child is bound to die, her text, by contrast, will continue transmitting her memory.

Dido’s challenge is developed throughout the epistle and turns into an actual negation of the Aeneid, particularly from lines 139–140 onward. As she rereads and, to some extent, rewrites Aeneas’s story, Dido imagines how Aeneas’s life could have been if he had remained in Carthage. The Trojan hero was meant to administer the treasure Dido had stolen from her brother Pygmalion (advectas Pygmalionis opes, 150) and rule over Carthage as though it were the new city he had been decreed to found: “Ilion in Tyriam transfer felicius urbem / resque loco regis sceptraque sacra tene” (Transfer your Ilion to the Tyrian town—a more fortunate choice; hold the power as a king and the holy scepter”; 151–152).⁹⁷ By using imperative forms, the heroine urges Aeneas to vividly envisage his potential life in her kingdom as though it could be an actual circumstance, thereby continuing her construction of an alternative story. Dido maintains that if Aeneas was looking for war and seeking an opportunity for Ascanius to show his valor in battle, in Carthage there would have been plenty of enemies.⁹⁸

Previously in the epistle, the heroine mentioned Ascanius’s safety as an argument in favor of Aeneas’s stay in Carthage (see lines 73–78, above). In this passage, by contrast, Dido claims that the hero’s establishment of his kingdom in Carthage would not prevent Ascanius from fighting (which implies risking his life) and obtaining his military glory. Together with the reference to her potential child, the heroine’s mention of Ascanius (Aeneas’s son with Creusa) contributes to the construction of an alternative future for Aeneas and his offspring. According to Dido, the Trojan hero does not need to seek and found another city to ensure eternal glory for his lineage, but Carthage can offer to him all he needs, including wars and enemies to enhance his own and Ascanius’s triumphus.⁹⁹ Quite ironically, while urging Aeneas’s stay in Carthage, the heroine refers to well-known Roman categories, as one can see from the expression suo partus Marte triumphus (154).¹⁰⁰ Similarly, at line 156, Dido uses a very marked sentence to indicate Aeneas’s potential future rule over Carthage and nearby peoples, (i.e., “hic pacis leges, hic locus arma capit,” Here there is place for the laws of peace, here there is place, too, for arms), which recalls Anchises’s mention of Aeneas’s mission at Aeneid 6.847–854 (see pacique imponere morem, “and to establish a rule for peace,” 852).¹⁰¹ This passage demonstrates once more how, while conversing with the Vergilian intertext, Dido also deconstructs it by depicting an alternative development of the story to how it is written in the Aeneid. The heroine therefore appears in control of Aeneas’s and her own destiny, at least within the literary world she builds. Dido’s prospective alternative narratives are in fact never fulfilled and seem to be neutralized by her suicide. The way in which the heroine describes her self-murder, however, suggests that her narrative will continue through her subversive writing.

Referring to her previous request for tempora parva (“a little time,” 178), Dido claims that if Aeneas is not willing to (at least) give her more time, she is resolved to kill herself (181), so that Aeneas cannot act cruelly toward her anymore (182).¹⁰² The expression effundere vitam (“to pour forth my life”) is visual and almost perceptible: as the verb effundo (“pour forth”) is often employed in connection to liquids, effundere vitam figuratively anticipates how Dido is planning to kill herself, namely, through the sword (so, pouring out her blood).¹⁰³ In the following two couplets (183–186), the heroine depicts herself in the act of writing (scribentis imago, 183), as Canace does at the very beginning of her letter (Her. 11.5). Like Canace, Dido is writing while holding a sword in her lap (184), which is now stained by the tears that flow down her cheeks (185):¹⁰⁴ these tears, however, will soon be replaced by blood spots (186). In this passage, the motif of the tears falling onto a page/piece of parchment, and spotting it, appears slightly modified, as the tears are said to fall onto the sword Dido is holding. The replacement of tears with blood spots represents, simultaneously, a conceptual, symbolical, and concrete metamorphosis of one corporeal fluid into another.

As we saw while examining Canace’s letter (see above, chapter 4), this idea of expelling body fluids can be connected to Kristeva’s conception of “abjection,” as well as filth and defilement, and eventually death. In light of Kristeva’s theorizations, tears, blood, and suicide may therefore be interpreted as Dido’s attempt to kill a part of her identity (that is, what would represent its abject component) to create a new, more genuine version of herself.¹⁰⁵ The process itself of writing, moreover, can also be linked to the notions of expulsion and discharge, as well as release and freeing. These elements suggest that it is the written text that allows Dido to escape the constraints of the previous literary tradition. At the same time, writing enables the heroine to evade the mirror image of herself, which is determined by phallogocentrism and portrayals of her as an “other.”

Like Canace, Dido also establishes a connection between the pen (i.e., her writing) and the sword, which may represent both a male weapon, marking Dido’s death as heroic, and Aeneas’s symbolic sexual penetration.¹⁰⁶ This metaphorical value is expressed most clearly at lines 189–190, where Dido claims this is not the first time her breast has been wounded by a weapon (189), as it was already the seat of the vulnus amoris (190): beyond being an elegiac topos, the theme of the vulnus amoris contributes to enhancing Aeneas’s responsibility for Dido’s suicide.¹⁰⁷ Such responsibility is also emphasized at lines 187–188, where Dido states ironically that Aeneas’s gift (the sword) is highly opportune to accomplish her fate: “quam bene conveniunt fato tua munera nostro” (187).¹⁰⁸ With a cunning rhetorical argument, Dido fully attributes the reason for her (heroic) suicide to Aeneas, insofar as he was not only the cause of her death but also provided the actual weapon that will help Dido to accomplish her self-murder.

Dido thus dies abandoned by Aeneas and without having given birth to any child by him; by contrast, her writing and story will survive. The final lines of the epistle (191–196) hint at this permanence of Dido and the perpetuation of her memory through her literary production and storytelling. After an invocation of her sister Anna (Anna soror, soror Anna, 191; geminatio and chiasm enhance the pathos of the line),¹⁰⁹ Dido asks her to give the ultima dona (“last gifts”) to her ashes (192; see Aen. 4.622–624). Through this expression, the heroine entrusts to her sister her last words, which represent the epigraph on her tomb, that is, how Dido wants to be remembered (see 194, “hoc tantum in tumuli marmore carmen erit”). However, in contrast to the epilogue of Dido’s episode in the Aeneid (see 6.450–476) and to what the heroine herself suggests throughout the epistle, Dido claims that she does not want to be commemorated as Elissa Sychaei (193), but instead asks for an epitaph that briefly summarizes her story (194):¹¹⁰ “PRAEBUIT AENEAS ET CAUSAM MORTIS ET ENSEM; / IPSA SUA DIDO CONCIDIT USA MANU” (195–196).¹¹¹ In this last couplet, Aeneas is said to have provided the fundamental and primary cause for Dido’s suicide (the abandonment), as well as supplying the actual and more immediate agent of Dido’s death, his sword. Several levels—metaphorical and real, as well as literary and literal—appear here to be combined and coexistent.¹¹² If the sword clearly belongs to Aeneas and has come from him as a gift, the heroine, meanwhile, emphasizes that “the hand” that accomplishes the suicidal act is her own (196): this final emphasis on the suicide as her own independent action enhances the heroic nature of Dido’s death.

By anticipating, and describing, her death and planning her suicide, the heroine keeps on rewriting the Aeneid. While in Aeneid 6 her loyalty to Sychaeus appears to last even after her death, in this passage Dido indissolubly links herself to Aeneas.¹¹³ Moreover, this closing of the epistle also suggests that Dido will survive after her death through her writing, her literary production. Her writing will not only replace Dido as a living being and entity but will perpetuate her story, as a child, Aeneas’s potential child, would perpetuate her lineage. This writing eventually reshapes the previous narrative related to Dido as a mythological figure, as well as her literary past. Heroides 7 can thus be understood as a surrogate for the heroine’s lack of children and subjective speech in the Aeneid. In this respect, the epistle is complementary to the Vergilian epic and reconciles its discontinuities. Concurrently, Dido’s writing represents an extension of her own body and subjectivity, and a product of her soul, as a child would be a product of her womb.¹¹⁴

Thus, Dido figuratively gives birth to the text, instead of a child. As a child would have represented Dido’s subjective projection into the world of history,¹¹⁵ so her autobiographical text allows her to independently construct her subjectivity. Writing gives Dido authority both as a character and as the writer of her story, as well as perpetuating her narrative; by writing, Dido reproduces a version of herself as a self-standing entity and subject. In Heroides 7, therefore, Dido replaces an actual pregnancy with being pregnant with her own text, and changes her hypothetical motherhood into a literary production.¹¹⁶ The essence of her potential pregnancy is therefore replaced by the materiality of the text she is writing: this “material/maternal is the instance that expresses the specificity of female sexuality.”¹¹⁷ By articulating her female subjectivity through her literary production, the heroine constructs a new version of herself as a mythological figure, a reader, and a woman who (actively) writes and shapes her identity. This empowerment also encompasses a certain jouissance in the act of writing, which balances Dido’s lack of the jouissance that is derived from actual motherhood and the experience of childbirth. Through the production of a text, Dido eventually gains authority over her own body and sexuality. Her storytelling, finally, expands the borders of her individual existence and allows her to have her voice heard throughout literary texts and time. As Hélène Cixous puts it,

She must write her self, because this is the invention of a new insurgent writing which, when the moment of her liberation has come, will allow her to carry out the indispensable ruptures and transformations in her history… . By writing her self, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display… . Write your self. Your body must be heard.¹¹⁸

1. Whether Dido’s love story was an invention of Vergil or was attested already in some previous sources, such as Naevius’s Bellum Punicum and/or Ennius’s Annales, “we rest assured that Ovid was following one model, the Aeneid” (Jacobson 1974, 77). For earlier versions of Dido’s myth, including the fragmentary account of Timaeus and the Historiae of Pompeius Trogus, see Rossbach in RE V 1.426–433, s.v. “Dido”; also Horsfall 1973, 1–13; Harrison 1989, 1–21; Bono and Tessitore 1999, 73–93.

2. Jacobson 1974, 90; also Adamietz 1984, 121–134; Miller 2004, 57, with notes.

3. See Kuhlmann 2003, 254–269; Miller 2004, 57–72; Casali 2004–2005, 141–148. For the debate between “pro-Augustan” and “anti-Augustan” interpretations of the Aeneid, see above, in the introduction. More particularly, for Vergil’s sympathy toward Dido or other “alternative” voices within the Aeneid, see Lyne 1987; Swanepoel 1995, 30–46.

4. Desmond 1993, 56–57.

5. Desmond 1994, 35–36.

6. Drinkwater (2022, 13–39) reads Heroides 7 as a way to revisit the Aeneid’s normative values by addressing the points in the Vergilian poem that already problematized those values: Dido’s epistle exemplifies a skeptical attitude toward Augustan propaganda that characterizes the Heroides throughout.

7. See, among others, Jacobson 1974, 77–78.

8. Bowie 1998, 65; Schiesaro 2005, 86–88; Lovatt 2013, 1–17.

9. Giusti 2018, 88–147 and passim.

10. Schiesaro 2008b, 209.

11. See Bednarowski 2015, 144–145; for Dido’s Homeric models, see Schmitz 2008, 85–103.

12. Habermehl 2006, 83–84; Zellner 2007, 15; for some general observations and bibliography on this episode, see Horsfall 1995a, 123–134.

13. For the elegized Dido, see Spoth 1992, 152–153; Cairns 1989, 129–150; for some remarks on Dido’s pudor as an equivalent of Greek aidōs as well as a Roman quality, see Collard 1975, 145.

14. See Harrison 1989, 1–21; also Moles 1984, 48–54; Nappa 2007, 301–313; Jolivet 2014, 77–86.

15. See Austin 1955, on 307, data dextera (see also on 316): “in what she wished to believe was a valid marriage-ceremony”; also Paratore 1978, 213. For the ambivalence of Dido’s intercourse with Aeneas, see Austin 1955, on 166: “Juno, goddess of marriage, is there … taking the place of the pronuba… . Virgil thus makes the wedding ritually correct, as one would expect him to.”

16. Dido’s speech is comparable to Medea’s in Argonautica, book 4.

17. For the Latin text of the Aeneid, see Mynors 1969; the English translation is from Fairclough 1916, with changes.

18. Servius’s commentary on line 328 (“ubi non est iustum matrimonium, liberi matrem sequuntur,” When there is not a just marriage, the children go with their mother) makes us think that Dido may have acknowledged, at least partly, the illegitimacy of her union with Aeneas. While the participle suscepta (327) is linked to the act of the Roman father, who “took up” the newborn, the word parvulus recalls Catull. 61.209 (an epithalamium where the poet celebrates Torquatus’s marriage and wishes him to have a child who resembles his father) and is the “only occurrence of a diminutive adjective in the whole Aeneid”; see Austin 1955, on 328; Paratore 1978, 215. According to Eidinow (2003, 260–267), these lines may allude to Cleopatra’s son with Caesar, Caesarion, and Augustus’s rejection of his legitimacy. For Dido as a literary embodiment of Cleopatra, see also Hardie 2006, 36; and Giusti (2018, 96), who defines “Cleopatra’s Egypt as the ‘historical model’ for Dido’s Carthage.”

19. In less attested versions of Dido’s myth, which in most cases did not contain any mention of Aeneas, the queen heroically committed suicide to save her people. These versions, which focus on Dido’s heroic stature, would be considered and developed by later authors, such as Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Chaucer: see Desmond 1994, 24–27, 45–73, 156.

20. McAuley 2016, 58–66.

21. See Rich 1977, 193; Kristeva 1982, 13: “The child can serve its mother as token of her own authentication.”

22. Irigaray 1993, 97–115, with Braidotti 2002, 13–14.

23. For the notion of “women’s time,” as opposed to the seriality and conformity characteristic of the time of history, men, and fathers, see Kristeva 1981, 13–35; for an analysis of Latin elegy through Kristeva’s reconceptualization of temporality, see Gardner 2013.

24. DuBois 1976, 14–23; Krummen 2004, 63–64.

25. Harrison 1989, 2–3.

26. Giusti 2018, 99–103.

27. For the significance of Dido’s suicide by sword, see Basto 1984, 333–338.

28. For the exchange of gifts between Aeneas and Dido, and the sword’s erotic connotation, see Thakur 2013, 181–182.

29. Basto 1984, 338; Harrison 1989, 19–20; Deist 2010, 75–76.

30. See Aen. 4.361: “Italiam non sponte sequor” (I am seeking Italy unwillingly); Catull. 66.39, with Horsfall 2013, 344–345.

31. See Pallas at Aen. 1.482, “diva solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat”; also Dido at 4.362.

32. “If Sychaeus were visible, then ought we not also to think of an element of jealousy in Aen.’s parting?” (Horsfall 2013, 352).

33. Spence 1999, 93–95.

34. McAuley 2016, 65.

35. Schiesaro 2008a, 60–109; Schiesaro 2008b, 194–245.

36. See Cavarero 2000, 32–45.

37. For the childbirth metaphor applied to both male and female writing, see Friedman 1987, 49–82, with bibliography.

38. Similarly, many contemporary female writers have drawn from the work of Vergil to create their writing, as they were other Didos: “The themes … will enable us to discern a Virgil who is specifically female. The innate paradox of this notion cannot be overstated. For thousands of years Virgil has been the quintessentially male poet singing of ‘arms and the man’ and hailed as ‘Father of the West’” (Cox 2011, 2).

39. Cixous 1976, 876, 889: “I wished that that woman would write and proclaim this unique empire so that other women, other unacknowledged sovereigns, might exclaim: I, too, overflow; my desires have invented new desires, my body knows unheard-of songs… . Her writing can only keep going.” For the equation between women’s writing and body within the Heroides, see also Spentzou 2003, 151–160.

40. Piazzi 2007, 17; Knox 1995, 201–202.

41. On the Heroidean Dido’s manipulation of her narrative, as well as interplay with sources and generic conventions, see Miller 2004, 58–61; also Gross 1979, 310; Kuhlmann 2003, 254–269.

42. See Dido’s words at Aen. 4.660: “sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras” (Thus, thus, I would like to go into the dark).

43. Some manuscripts report an alternative opening: “accipe, Dardanide, moriturae carmen Elissae; / quae legis a nobis ultima verba legis” (Receive, o Trojan, the poem of Elissa, who is about to die. The words you read are the last ones you read from me). Although certain scholars (e.g., Dörrie 1960 and Kirfel 1969) believed this opening authentic, I side with Knox (1995, 61, 203), who considers it an interpolation of a “medieval reader.” For a review of the scholarly debate, see Piazzi 2007, 113–115.

44. See Jacobson 1974, 83–84; Adamietz 1984, 123; Habermehl 2006, 75–76; see Ov. Met. 14.428–430; Fast. 2.108–110.

45. While the content of Her. 7 and the literary tradition suggest that suicide will be the “natural” outcome of Dido’s narrative, the fact that the letter necessarily interrupts before its writer’s (forecasted) suicidal act opens up alternative possibilities: see Walde 2000, 131; Habermehl 2006, 88.

46. The alternative opening couplet would have supplied that piece of information: Knox 1995, 203; Piazzi 2007, 114–115.

47. See Aen. 4.554; Ov. Met. 11.440; Her. 6.51, 15.99 (with Piazzi 2007, 124–125). For the adjective misera linked to Dido, see Ov. Am. 2.18.25; also Dido’s first plea to Aeneas at Aen. 4.315 (mihi … miserae).

48. For Dido’s fama as ill repute, see Knox 1995, 204; for its reception in the poetry of the Augustan poet Sulpicia, see Hallett 2006, 38.

49. For delay and absence as rhetorical strategies in elegy, which contribute to “the pleasure of the text,” see Connolly 2000, 71–98.

50. For delay as a trait d’union between artistic creation and the sexual act, see Scholes 1979, 26 (as discussed in more detail below).

51. See Barthes 1975, 3–13. Dido’s pleasure in writing reflects a sort of narcissistic pleasure that derives from her autobiographical storytelling, as described by Cavarero (2000, 40): “In its silent autobiographical exercise, personal memory turns the narratable self into Narcissus… . Like an impossible game of mirrors, the self is indeed here both the actor and the spectator, the narrator and the listener, in a single person.”

52. “Does the text have human form, is it a figure, an anagram of the body? Yes, but of our erotic body… . The pleasure of the text is that moment when my body pursues its own ideas—for my body does not have the same ideas as I do” (Barthes 1975, 17).

53. Moreover, altera Dido, as well as referring to Ovid’s own Dido, i.e., the writer, might also evoke the Sibyl’s controversial prophecy at Aen. 6.89, where the alius Achilles can be either Aeneas or Turnus. The altera Dido, in its surface meaning, is Lavinia herself, just as the alius Achilles is Aeneas (or Turnus). For the anaphoric repetition of altera (alter amor; altera Dido; altera … fides), see Spoth 1992, 152–153; Lindheim 2003, 93; Piazzi 2007, 135.

54. The lack of fides is a widespread elegiac topos, and is mainly drawn from Catullus (see, e.g., Catull. 70, 71, 72, 73, 75). This is also a leitmotif within the Heroides: see Penelope in Her. 1 (especially lines 75–80); 2.26; 7.8, 57, 110; Oenone in Her. 5; 10.78; Hypsipyle in Her. 6, and Medea in Her. 12 (passim).

55. On the Heroides as prospecting alternative outcomes of the narrative, see Barchiesi 2001, 29–47; Liveley 2008, 86–102; on Her. 7, see Walde 2000, 124–138.

56. For Lavinia’s brief appearances within the Aeneid (e.g., 12.64–69), see Formicula 2006, 76.

57. Woodworth 1930, 176, 194; Cairns 1989, 151; Formicula 2006, 94–96; Perotti 2009, 18–20.

58. Following Kristeva’s theorization (1980, 40), it can be said that the Ovidian Dido changes the symbolic language of the Aeneid into signs, i.e., her written text, by developing its implied meaning, while also modifying its intrinsic message. Accordingly, she reifies, objectifies, that message, and somehow appropriates it.

59. Cavarero 2000, 120: “The narration, multiplying itself within itself, becomes ‘infinite and circular.’”

60. On the reception of the Vergilian Dido, see Desmond 1994.

61. “Throughout this section O.’s heroine writes as if Aeneas were a third party to the ‘conversation’” (Knox 1995, 207). For love as a mental illness, see Thumiger 2018, 253–273; on Dido more specifically, see Mazzini 1995, 92–105.

62. See Maltby 1991, 371; see Am. 1.1.1–2; 1.3.19 (“te mihi materiem felicem in carmina praebe,” Offer yourself to me as a fortunate matter for my songs); see Knox 1995, 209; for cura, see Verg. Aen. 4.1, 5, 332, 394, 448.

63. See e contrario, Aen. 4.12: “credo equidem, nec vana fides, genus esse deorum” (I believe it well—nor is my confidence vain—that he is sprung from gods).

64. Knox 1995, 209; Piazzi 2007, 155–158.

65. For Dido as an elegiac poet, see Piazzi 2007, 155; also Barchiesi 2001, 42–43; Miller 2004, 68–69.

66. Kroll 1924, 218.

67. For the Vergilian Dido’s pathological furor and its link to maenadism, see Mazzini 1995, 92–105; Krummen 2004, 25–69; Totola 2009, 360–362; also Schiesaro 2005, 89n14.

68. Jacobson 1974, 79–80, 85; Kuhlmann 2003, 265–267; Habermehl 2006, 91.

69. The motif of the mora, i.e., Aeneas’s delay in leaving Carthage, is quite recurrent in Aen. 4 (see, e.g., 51, 433, 566–569). For Ascanius as an argument against the hero’s departure, see Habermehl 2006, 79–80; Casali 2004–2005, 155–156. In the Aeneid, by contrast, Ascanius was presented as a reason to leave as soon as possible: see Aen. 4.234, 274–276, 354–355, with Knox 1995, 215.

70. See Aen. 1.657–660. For the metapoetic implications of the overlap between Cupid and Ascanius, as well as the generic interplay within the Aeneid, see Ziogas 2010, 150–174.

71. See, e.g., Dixon 1988, 104–140.

72. For further remarks on the relationship between Dido and Ascanius, see Hardie 2006, 26–27; Bowie 1998, 66–68; McAuley 2016, 59–61; Rogerson 2017, 74.

73. Piazzi 2007, 197: see Her. 15.190, 21.176; Tr. 1.11.30.

74. Ascanius is usually indicated as pulcher in the Aeneid (see 5.570; 7.107; 9.293, 310), whereas formosus is generally avoided in the high style; by contrast, it is very frequent in elegy (e.g., Ov. Am. 1.6.63, 1.14.31, 2.1.37, 3.3.18; Her. 14.88; Ars am. 1.55; also Catull. 86.1, 3; Prop. 1.20.52, 2.28.2; see Kapp in TLL online, VI 1, 1110–1113, s.v. “formosus”). On the alternation between two names for Aeneas’s son, i.e., Iulus and Ascanius, see Rogerson 2017, 10–11; Knox 1995, 215.

75. For Dido’s identification with Creusa, see Casali 2004–2005, 156.

76. See Rich 1977, 186: “The mother as seducer, with whom the son longs to sleep, against whom the incest taboo is strongest: Jocasta, Gertrude… . It is mother-son incest which has been most consistently taboo in every culture and which has received the most obsessive attention in the literature men have written.”

77. Segal (1986a, 50, 52) uses the term “megatext” to indicate Greco-Roman myths when taken collectively to imply a single fictional world, based on the fusion of oral tradition and written sources as well as folkloric tales. In this instance, Dido’s megatext can be said to be made up of all sources referring to Dido’s mythological episode—and/or some elements/parts of it. For an application of Segal’s megatext to Ovid’s female characters, see Westerhold 2023.

78. See De Lauretis 1984, 109.

79. Kristeva 1985, 133–152.

80. Scholes 1979, 26, as quoted in De Lauretis 1984, 108; see also Barthes 1975, 7, 10.

81. As mentioned, in Her. 7, delay, which contributes to the arousal of desire, is a prominent pattern.

82. De Lauretis 1984, 179: “The interpreter, the ‘user’ of the sign(s), is also the producer of the meaning (interpretant) because that interpreter is the place in which, the body in whom, the significate effect of the sign takes hold. That is the subject in and for whom semiosis takes effect.”

83. Piazzi 2007, 248. See also Her. 6.119–120, Hypsipyle’s actual motherhood: “nunc etiam peperi; gratare ambobus, Iason! / dulce mihi gravidae fecerat auctor onus” (And now, too, I have even given birth; rejoice for us both, Jason! The author of this pregnancy had made this burden sweet for me).

84. See Bowie 1998, 71–72.

85. See Grosz 1995, 21–22: “Nevertheless, there are ways in which the sexuality and corporeality of the subject leave their traces or marks on the texts produced, just as we in turn must recognize that the processes of textual production also leave their trace or residue on the body of the writer (and readers)… . The text cannot be conceived simply as an intentional effect, but can also be seen from the point of view of its production and the labor that always leaves its mark in its product.”

86. Kristeva 1982, 161.

87. See also Servius’s commentary (ad Aen. 6.861), with Ziogas 2017, 434–438; see also Horsfall 1995b, 3–4, 19.

88. McAuley 2016, 91, with notes.

89. Reader-response criticism stresses the centrality of the reader in the process of the interpretation of literary texts. According to Bleich’s (1978) subjective reader-response theory, there is no literary text beyond the readers’ interpretation, but the readers’ response is what creates the text.

90. Hor. Carm. 3.30.6–7: “non omnis moriar, multaque pars mei / vitabit Libitinam” (I will not be wholly dead; a large part of me will elude the Goddess of Death); Ov. Met. 15.875–876: “parte tamen meliore mei super alta perennis / astra ferar, nomenque erit indelebile nostrum” (However, with my better part, I will be brought, immortal, beyond the high stars, and my name will be indelible).

91. Barthes 1975, 27.

92. See line 7, miseramque … Dido.

93. See Aeolus as auctor in Canace’s letter, above, chapter 4; Bögel in TLL online, II 0, 1194–1213, s.v. “auctor.”

94. Relevantly, Cavarero 2000, 120: “The Homeric epic … placed the hero at the center—turning his death into an occasion for the immortality of the tale—‘the narrative then redeemed this accepted death’; or, rather, the tale took death and immortalized the protagonist.”

95. “A particularly forceful indictment of the ancestor of the Julian gens by Dido; Augustus would probably not have been amused” (Knox 1995, 225).

96. See above, Her. 11.123–124: “et refer ad matrem socioque inpone sepulcro, / urnaque nos habeat quamlibet arta duos!” (And bring them again to their mother, and put them in a shared tomb. May one urn, however cramped, hold us both!); also Prop. 2.28.41–42; Tib. 3.10.19–20; Ov. Am. 2.13.15–16; Her. 19.149. According to Casali 2004–2005, 151–152 and Schiesaro 2005, 93–97, Dido might allude here to infanticide (which cannot be enacted in fact because of the premature death of her fetus), thereby linking herself to Medea.

97. See Aen. 1.572–573; 4.214, 373–374, 597; for the variant readings of this line, see the discussion in Piazzi 2007, 261–262.

98. In these lines, it seems that Dido is trying to find a balance between epic and elegiac values, i.e., between Aeneas’s and her own ethic (see Piazzi 2007, 262–263). For the expression partus … triumphus, see, e.g., Aen. 2.578; Ov. Am. 2.12.16; also Her. 3.122, 21.115.

99. For the Roman triumphus within the Heroides, see Her. 9 (chapter 2, above); also OLD, s.v. “triumphus.”

100. According to Piazzi (2007, 263), by using this phrasing, Dido is trying to align with Aeneas’s ideological and cultural world. While Octavian celebrated his last official triumphus in 29 BC, in the following years, the princeps manipulated the triumph’s political meaning, making it become an exclusive celebration for the members of the imperial family. For the central role of the triumph in Augustan propaganda, including buildings, monuments, and coins, see Hickson 1991, 124–138.

101. Jacobson 1974, 88; see also Aen. 4.347, “hic amor, haec patria est” (This is the love, this is the homeland); for pacis leges, see Aen. 4.618.

102. For crudelis in reference to Aeneas, see Aen. 4.310–311, 661.

103. See Leumann in TLL online, V 2, 214–227 (“A. res liquidas”; “2 a. sanguinem, cruorem”), s.v. “effundo.”

104. See Aen. 4.646–647. The sword is representative of Dido’s story in Am. 2.18.25, tenens strictum Dido miserabilis ensem (“wretched Dido, holding the sword close”); Ars am. 3.39–40; Met. 14.81. Dido’s tears falling on Aeneas’s sword engages with and modifies the topos of the tears or blood staining the letter in, e.g., Her. 3.3–4, 11.1–2, 15.97–98; Prop. 4.3.3–6.

105. See Kristeva 1982, 3.

106. Desmond 1994, 31, 42–43; on Aeneas’s sword in Her. 7, see Akbar Kahn 1968, 283–285 (Her. 7).

107. This is an example of “realization in the narrative of events initially figurative” (Hardie 1986, 232–233; also Spoth 1992, 130). Similarly, the vulnus (of love) at Aen. 4.67 becomes the literal wound for Dido’s suicide at Aen. 4.689.

108. See Aen. 4.646–647. In this passage, the substantive munus primarily means “gift,” but since munus is often used in reference to offerings to the dead, it may also hint at Dido’s forecasted death: see Lumpe in TLL online, VIII 0, 1662–1667, s.v. “munus”; Catull. 101.3.

109. See Aen. 4.9–10; for a similar chiastic anaphora in Ovid, see, e.g., Am. 2.5.43; Ars am. 1.99. By invoking her sister (for the first time), Dido seems to go beyond the bounds of the epistolary genre and play the role of a tragic heroine: as observed, this code-switching is a pattern intrinsic to the Heroides.

110. The word carmen can indicate a funeral inscription: beyond Her. 2.145–146 (Phyllis’s auto-epitaph: “inscribere meo causa invidiosa sepulcro. / aut hoc aut simili carmine notus eris,” On my tombstone, you shall be inscribed as the hateful cause of my death: by this, or by some similar epitaph, you shall be known; with Lindheim 2003, 97–98), see, e.g., Verg. Ecl. 5.42; Prop. 4.7.83; Ov. Am. 2.6.59–60; Met. 14.441–442; Fast. 3.547–550 (see Hey in TLL online, III 0, 463–474, s.v. “carmen”).

111. See Dido’s last words in Aen. 4.653–658, where the epitaph motif is implied by the verb vixi (653).

112. In rhetorical terms, this can be defined as a syllepsis, as the verb praebeo has a concrete value with respect to ensem, but an abstract one with respect to causam; see Piazzi 2007, 305.

113. “When Aeneas meets Dido in the underworld in the Aeneid, he asks incredulously (6.458), funeris heu tibi causa fui? O.’s Dido answers” (Knox 1995, 233).

114. Kristeva 1985, 134.

115. Rich 1977, 193.

116. In this way, she sanctions “the death of man,” as Kristeva (1982, 161) would put it.

117. Braidotti 2002, 23; see also De Lauretis 1984, 5–6.

118. Cixous 1976, 880.