The Univira

      Feel free to turn on “White Flag” for this post; I’m certainly going to town with it.

      Dido is immediately noteworthy as a female ruler in a culture that didn’t terribly encourage female rulers. She was born a Phoenician princess and by the best historical accounts (which, let’s make clear right from the beginning, are all reported fourth-hand by Greeks--it’s a great tragedy, at least in my view, that Dido actually lived within a historical period in a society with a fastidious record-keeping tradition, but most of the records happen to have been destroyed) was made co-ruler with her brother when her father died. Nevertheless, a power struggle ensued between Dido and her brother, and in consequence her husband was murdered. She was forced out of power in her home kingdom and embarked on a mission to found her own city, which she accomplished successfully. (And how many ancient Mediterranean cities name a woman as their founder?) Carthage, her new city in North Africa (Qart-hadasht is Phoenician for “New Town”),  went on to become an important state in the Mediterranean and menaced Rome for several centuries until it was crushed, decimated, and repopulated by Roman settlers. Throughout Carthaginian history, Dido was honored as the founder and was depicted on Carthaginian coins like an old-world George Washington.

      Dido is famous from the Aeneid, and that’s a shame. Women in the Aeneid overall have a bad reputation. Vergil’s female characters tend to personify chaos, irrationality, selfishness, vindictiveness, and resistance to the grand plans of patriarchal benevolence as represented by Jupiter and Aeneas. (These traits are applied to Vergil’s female characters as a substitute for personality; the only exception is Lavinia, who as substitute for personality has…nothing. Although I hear she might be more interesting in Ursula K. Leguin’s novel.) So it’s unfortunate that the vast majority of people who hear about Dido hear about her from Vergil, in whose epic she is depicted as above all romantically obsessed with the hero. Even though she is, before Aeneas arrives, the competent queen of Carthage whose priorities center on her people’s needs, once she meets Aeneas she quickly falls in love with him and things go downhill. Her romance with Aeneas spirals out of control until she is neglecting the needs of the state in favor of her love life. When Aeneas attempts to leave in pursuit of his original mission, Dido tries to detain him, but her efforts fail, Aeneas departs, and she rages through the streets. Finally, driven insane by grief and frustrated love, she commits suicide. The narrative arc follows her overall loss of dignity and competence as she, in her feminine weakness, succumbs to the allure of romance.

      As I say, it’s a shame that when people hear about Dido, this is the Dido they hear about, because this is not the only version of the story recorded. When Vergil wrote the Aeneid around existing legendary characters--Aeneas, the Trojan colonist who settled near Rome, and Dido, the Phoenician colonist who settled in north Africa centuries later--he did some serious reinventing of the characters. Although Varro depicted Aeneas meeting Dido and her sister, we have no evidence that anyone prior to Vergil depicted Dido as falling in love with Aeneas. In fact, pre-Vergilian legend depicted Dido as being unwaveringly loyal to her first husband (the one her brother killed), and unwilling to remarry for any reason. (I wish I could cite a good source for this legend, but again, all the references we have to this story from antiquity seem to be quoted third-hand out of Greek compilations of Phoenician compilations. You can try looking Dido up in Timaeus or Justin, but I doubt you’ll find all the information you want; I certainly didn’t.) In this version, Aeneas never enters the story. Dido is so devoted to her late husband that she has vowed never to remarry. Nevertheless, a local African king wishes to marry her, and presents a generous offer to her magistrates that would greatly benefit the Carthaginian state. The magistrates know that Dido will never accept remarriage, so they lay a trap for her: they outline the benefits that the king proposes to provide, mention that he has stipulated as a condition of these benefits that a Carthaginian must live with him to teach him about Carthaginian culture, and they theatrically despair of finding anyone willing to leave Carthage to perform this service. Dido objects that any patriotic Carthaginian ought to be happy to provide such a benefit to the state--at which point the magistrates reveal that the king has requested Dido specifically, as his wife. Trapped by her words, but still unwilling to remarry, she commits suicide rather than betray her vow.

      Here there is no romantic obsession with a traveling hero, no consuming feminine weakness that aggressively corrodes her ability to rule. Her tragic flaw is her integrity, and her devotion to her husband even when it conflicts with the interests of her state. We can still debate whether it was healthy that she was so bound up in her identity as her husband’s wife that she would prefer to commit suicide than remarry, or whether a good ruler ought to accept a political marriage that benefits the state even when it is unappealing to the ruler personally, but in any case the pre-Vergilian picture of Dido is very different from and more respectable than the suicidal nymphomaniac Vergil shows us. In fact, Dido was held up as the paragon of the univira, a woman who only married once and demonstrated devotion to her husband, the kind of woman men wanted to marry and women were encouraged to emulate. (Talk about the Paragon of Fidelity!) In Vergil’s Dido there is little virtue that any ancient people would have held up for emulation.

      And in this you can see the mythological tradition in action. Post-Vergil, people could talk about Dido, but they had to be clear about which Dido they were talking about, because the one identity had been split into two ideas, the Vergilian or the non-Vergilian. Do you mean crazy Dido or virtuous Dido? Unfortunately, Vergil’s account was so dramatic and influential (and played so well into existing stereotypes of women as incompetent rulers) that subsequent accounts of Dido tend to be based on it: Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas or Marlowe’s play Dido, Queen of Carthage, for example. In these, Dido is an archetypal tragic figure, wretchedly in love with Aeneas and lamenting how he abandoned her. Nevertheless, the tradition of Dido as virtuous and honorable stays alive in Servius’ works and Boccaccio’s de Mulieribus Claris. The refashioning of an old archetypal character (a widowed queen) in order to discuss an idea that a new mythmaker finds relevant (empowered women cause chaos) is a classic way to develop ideas through myth, and it is typical for mythical characters to absorb new meanings and acquire polyvalence as their cultural life goes on. Dido’s cultural life--like Sappho’s, and like those of many legendary women--has exemplified a strong dichotomy between her “good” aspect and her “evil” aspect, and although her “evil” aspect tends to be better known, I at least would like to see her “good” aspect remembered.