Dido

RESUMEN: Este trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar relaciones intratextuales entre las epístolas de Dido (Ep. VII) y Medea (Ep. XII), pertenecientes al corpus de las Heroidas, de Ovidio. Para ello, nos centraremos en los puntos de contacto concernientes al foedus amoris, al furor y a la muerte como desenlace de sus lamentos. Mediante este procedimiento, se demostrará que Medea, como figura ejemplar, contribuye en la configuración de Dido, no solo de forma intertextual (ya que Dido presenta rasgos de la Medea de Apolonio), sino también de forma intratextual.
Palabras clave: Dido, Medea, Heroidas, intratextualidad, ejemplaridad.

In The Aeneid, Virgil creates Dido, an amalgamation of literary and historical female characters, queen of future enemy Carthage, and serious threat to the founding of an eventual empire. Before she can prevent Aeneas from fulfilling his divinely sanctioned quest however, her agency is totally stripped away by the power of outside, godly forces. By Book IV, she has devolved into his helpless, dramatic, and deranged girlfriend, a passive female out of control of her own body. Dido is initially introduced as a formidable equal, if not better, of Aeneas; both her resistance to be marginalized as a stereotypical female and the loss of the very agency that differed her from stereotypes make her arc the most complex of Virgil’s entire epic and her eventual suicide the most unsettling yet ultimately satisfying end to her story.

El Epítome de Justino se ha señalado tradicionalmente como el modelo del que Alonso de Ercilla se sirvió para escribir el episodio consagrado a Dido en La Araucana. La fuente, sin embargo, fue la traducción que Francisco de Enzinas hizo en 1552 de Todas las décadas de Tito Livio. El conocimiento de esa fuente nos permite saber cómo trabajó el poeta en la composición de su texto y algunas de las razones que le llevaron a acudir a Enzinas.

This paper examines the way the depiction of Medea in Ennius’ Medea exul and that of Ariadne in Catullus 64 constitute the background for the Dido-episode of Vergil’s Aeneid. Regarding the intertextual relations of the Vergilian and the Catullan texts, I focus on the motif of fluctus curarum, the ‘flow of concerns’ affecting the above mentioned heroines. These Catullo-Vergilian intertextual connections are tinged by the circumstance that the phrase is also employed by Lucretius in his De rerum natura. It will be of key importance to observe the way the Aeneid’s combined reminiscences to the Lucretian mankind as a victim of illusions and to the Catullan Ariadne as not only a victim but also a product of them lay the foundation of Dido’s falling prey to unrealities.

The ancient figure of Dido is caught between two cities: Rome and Carthage, imperial capital and imperial capital manqué. An eroticized, conquered other, she nevertheless commandeers the narrative viewpoint. Through her this paper explores different regimes that irreconcilably promise syncretism while threatening homogeneity: empire, the Baroque, globalization. Tensions between polycentric and hierarchical tendencies, cosmopolitan and metropolitan, within the Baroque as within globalization and empire give them normalizing or recuperative power. Dido being a focus of the reception of Roman antiquity in all periods, the exploration could proceed through any number of (sets of) texts, but here will focus around three: Virgil’s Aeneid, its 17th-century Occitan “burlesque” translations, and the post-war and post-colonialist fiction and criticism that has contested Dido’s role in imperialist structures. The Aeneid has Dido commit suicide with her lover Aeneas’ sword atop a pyre surmounted by his belongings, thus climaxing a teasing assimilation between the two characters’ national destinies, and brutally precipitating the Roman’s other in paradoxical form. In the Occitan poetry of the 17th century, under existential threat from French, “burlesque” versions of Dido’s story proliferate as if Occitan were a more legitimate vehicle of an antiphrastic mode of receiving and reworking antiquity, a complicated and ironic stance ventured, but not owned, by French writers. Finally, the post-colonial replacements for imperial regimes contextualize treatments of Dido that parallel globalization’s claims to find common ground within diversity and reflect its power to efface that diversity. Any dream of universal convertibility can lead in either direction.

Monarchs and other high-ranking dignitaries could pay visits to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge at very short notice (avoiding plague in London, for example). This paper investigates the University of Oxford’s response to the arrival of a Polish diplomat, Adalbert Łaski (Albertus Alasco), in June 1583, an occasion when scholars were challenged to amuse and impress, but also to be creative under pressure. William Gager (1555–1622) rose to the challenge with his tragedy entitled Dido, which was performed for Łaski in Christ Church dining hall. His script is easily recognisable as a reworking of Books I and IV from Virgil’s Aeneid, indeed the play relies on the audience’s familiarity with this model to appreciate Gager’s sense of humour and his interest in self-presentation. But this is a poem transformed into a different medium - how far does Gager’s methodology represent a return to a comfort zone? How did Gager prepare this play in three weeks? And does the tone of his literary borrowings affect our interpretation of the Dido’s contemporary references to university-court politics and foreign diplomacy under the reign of Queen Elizabeth?