The well-organized society that Dido had created prior to Aeneas’s arrival is drastically changed once she becomes infatuated with him. The building of Carthage comes to a complete stop. Even worse, the city’s defense against enemy invasion—a concern that Anna uses to urge her sister to pursue Aeneas—is not maintained. In one of the poem’s few instances of overtly moral proselytizing, Virgil warns that passion—love out of control—causes disorder, both physically and emotionally, and even affects one impiously: “What good are shrines and vows to maddened lovers? / The inward fire eats the soft marrow away, / And the internal wound bleeds on in silence.” Dido affirms that unbridled love fosters chaos when, raging at Aeneas, she scorns the gods. Her faithlessness in the gods and destiny demonstrates just how psychologically mad she has become.
Virgil’s portrayal of Dido in Book IV is one of the great literary character studies in all of literature. Dido finally knows, as do we, that she is doomed to fail in her conquest of Aeneas, yet we applaud her resourcefulness in facing down her destiny. Her begging at the beginning of Book IV for the earth to swallow her before she falls deeper into passion’s indomitable grip is balanced by a similar self-recognition of her plight toward the book’s end, when she asks of herself, “What am I saying? Where am I? What madness / Takes me out of myself? Dido, poor soul, / Your evil doing has come home to you.” Tragically, no matter how much she is aware of the danger her passion presents, she cannot prevent her own psychological demise.
In some ways, Dido, like Turnus, her male counterpart in the second half of the Aeneid, is even more heroic than Aeneas. After all, Aeneas eventually learns that fate is on his side no matter how difficult his journey may be. Dido and Turnus, however, are heroic without this assurance, most of all at the moment of their deaths.
Stylistically, Virgil reinforces Dido’s inability to control her passion by imagining her as a fire that grows and cannot be quenched. The book’s first lines characterize this gnawing, excruciating lust: “The queen, for her part, all that evening ached / With longing that her heart’s blood fed, a wound / Or inward fire eating her away.” And when Dido discovers Aeneas’s intent to leave her city, she becomes “all aflame / With rage.” Her burning passion for the Trojan warrior is so great that she becomes physically sick. Fittingly, she dies on a pyre, used for burning corpses in funeral rites. However, her inner flame has been extinguished by her own hand; there is no reason to light the pyre now.
The Carthaginian queen is the plaything, the pawn, of both Juno and Venus. She has no freedom except in her choice to kill herself, an act of courage that proves she is a tragic—as well as a romantic—heroine. Indeed, Dido loses, but the cruel goddesses who use her lose also. In trying against their better judgment to alter the will of fate, they only serve it: The passion that Venus inspires and Juno sanctions is, as fate decrees, frustrated, causing Dido to put a curse on the Trojans, which, in turn, will lead to the Punic Wars.
Although Juno and Venus’s intention is to change the fated outcomes of human lives, their manipulative actions are the very instruments of fate that will ensure Rome’s triumph and Carthage’s defeat. Juno knows that Rome’s eventual victory over its rival city has been decreed, but the goddess’s attempts to block this outcome ironically make it possible. Likewise, the Romans, although ultimately victorious, will endure hardships—the Punic Wars—that Venus, of whom they are the favored people, does not foresee when she attempts to protect her son by having Dido fall in love with him. Fate moves toward its end as inexorably as water flows down to the sea; it may be forced to change its course a little, but it triumphs over every attempt to prevent its fulfillment.
