Anna becomes Perenna

      It’s no fun being an ancillary character in someone else’s narrative. Take the romance of Dido and Aeneas, for example. (Back to the Aeneid!) Aeneas shows up in Dido’s city, Dido falls obsessively in love with him, her life falls apart as she devotes all her time to trying to keep him, he leaves town and she kills herself, leaving Carthage in fiery chaos. (After he leaves, she builds up a huge pyre of flammable goods, sets it alight, and stabs herself to death on top of it. When Aeneas is sailing out of town, he spots the flames (how big is this conflagration?) and idly wonders where they’re coming from.) Dido dominates the stage in Vergil’s Carthage, and much has been written about the Tragic Dido, the Elegiac Dido, the Romantic Dido, the Epic Dido, the Stateswoman Dido, the Perilous Dido, the Masculine Dido, the Victorious Dido, etc., etc…and yet, there is a complete cast of people, almost exclusively female, populating Carthage, people who perhaps ought to be important (an entire city full of women? I haven’t seen that since Lemnos!), and yet who are drowned out by Dido’s Typhoean performance. There’s the priestess who lives in the mountains, who serves a divine dragon and knows magic spells to reverse the motion of the stars, to summon the dead, and--which is crucial to the plot--to cure love-sickness. There’s the faithful nurse Barce, who cares for Dido and may be (that is, Vergil may have wanted to imply that she is) related to the later generations of Barcid kings of Carthage, which eventually produced Hannibal Barca. And there’s Anna, the sister and faithful confidante of Dido, who mostly serves as a sounding board for Dido’s ideas and doesn’t really get to do anything except react to her sister’s increasingly unstable actions…at least, not in the Aeneid.

      Fortunately, our understanding of Anna is not confined to the Aeneid. Ovid provides a lengthy discussion of Anna’s adventures after Dido’s suicide, constructed as a coda to Vergil’s work. (Actually, there are several codas to the Aeneid in the works of Ovid, but let’s focus on this one.) Of course, in the Aeneid Dido commits suicide and sets a fire large enough to be seen from the sea, and that’s the end of Vergil’s interest in Carthage. Ovid, on the other hand, writes the aftermath, in which Anna is cast as the heroine. Here Dido’s suicide prompts an attack from a nearby African king, and Anna--already a fugitive from her home city of Tyre--flees her new home, with a number of followers, through a series of islands and settlements in the western Mediterranean. A long sequence of travels and travails is sometimes the price you pay for being the hero of your own story. But at last she arrives in Italy, and as luck would have it runs into Aeneas, who happens to be strolling barefoot along the shore. If you believe Vergil, once Aeneas has arrived in Italy at the future site of Rome, he’s already taken a detour through the underworld and run into Dido’s ghost. (He asks her, ‘Was I, alas, the cause of your death?’ followed by, ‘O Queen, truly I departed from your shore unwillingly.’ She refuses to speak to him.) Knowing at this point that Dido is dead, Aeneas makes a sententious, apologetic speech to Anna in which he claims that he never meant any harm to Dido and certainly didn’t want her to kill herself and was totally oblivious to her heartbreak and hey, he says, adroitly preventing her from contributing to the conversation, let’s forget it ever happened and not talk about it anymore.

      So far Anna’s adventures aren’t going so well. She’s been violently exiled from her home and the former acquaintance she meets refuses to even listen to her story. Nevertheless, he does agree to take her in and shelter her (her companions are never mentioned again, so we can only speculate on whether they’re still with her or not). Unfortunately, Aeneas’ wife Lavinia turns out to have unexpected influence in this story. If you remember the Aeneid, you can be forgiven for forgetting Lavinia because she’s a totally colorless character--she has no lines, she undertakes no action, and she functions as a personified prop. She’s the princess that Aeneas needs to marry to establish his authority in Italy, and she has no personality beyond that. (She blushes at one point, which is as near as she comes to expressing an opinion.) But in Ovid, she has a personality, oh goodness yes: she is insanely jealous of this woman who appears out of her husband’s past. In fact, Lavinia is so jealous that, during Anna’s first night in their house, Lavinia sends a troop of goons to Anna’s bedroom for unspecified (but implied to be very unpleasant) purposes. Rising to the occasion, Anna jumps out a window and manages to escape, and when she reaches the river Numicius, the river god saves her by turning her into a water nymph. Ovid says that she lives on as Anna Perenna, a crone-like goddess who represents the turning year in rustic Roman religion. She actually becomes something of an amusing trickster goddess, playing bawdy pranks on Mars. This transformation from Dido’s sister into the Roman year goddess is not recorded anywhere before Ovid, and it has always been my opinion that Ovid made up the connection based on the similar names--more or less a coincidence, since Dido’s sister has a Phoenician name, whereas the Roman year goddess has a name derived from the Latin word for ‘year’--nevertheless, I’m willing to run with it. I appreciate Ovid’s decision to take a character who has suffered so many tragedies (exile from her home, the suicide of her sister, further exiles and attacks, not to mention the fact that she couldn’t find shelter with anyone except the man who caused her sister’s suicide) and give her a happier ending. Although I should note that Aeneas, too, was eventually deified among the gods of Italy. I just hope Anna didn’t have to hang out with Aeneas when the Italian gods had parties. Or maybe, given Anna Perenna's penchant for bawdy humor and Aeneas' frigid attitude toward sexuality, I hope she did.