Dido and Aeneas

This discussion outlines the poetical features of style and narrative technique which contribute to Virgil's psychological characterisation and considers the role of audience response - in terms of reception, intertextuality and ideology - in determining Virgil's characterisation.

Il presente volume offre uno dei possibili itinerari di riscoperta della figura di Didone - dalle riscritture tardoantiche degli autori latini di area africana (Apuleio, Draconzio, gli autori della "Anthologia Latina") ad una curiosa declinazione del mito nel secolo XVII (il "Lamento di Didone" del poeta umbro Francesco Melosio) e ad alcune considerazioni intorno al coevo commento virgiliano del gesuita Juan Luis De la Cerda. I criteri su cui si impianta questo studio - e la selezione a monte delle 'riscritture' - sono di natura essenzialmente estetica: in tal senso, il termine 'barocco' viene inteso non tanto nell’accezione vulgata di precisa demarcazione storico cronologica, quanto piuttosto nel valore tipologico di categoria stilistica ed estetica, paradigmatica e fuori dal tempo.
Coerentemente con una delle probabili etimologie del termine - che rinvia al portoghese aljofre barroco (‘perla irregolare’) - ‘barocco’ è ritenuto, infatti, tutto ciò che appa-re lambiccato e concettoso, giocato sul ricorso alla metafora e al paradosso. Di "barocco letterario" si è parlato per certa produzione degli autori latini (dal Seneca tragico ai toni drammatici di Lucano e all'orrido di Stazio), soprattutto tardoantichi: anche alcune sezioni della produzione epigrammatica o enigmistica di "Anthologia Latina", per il fatto di essere poesia breve e generalmente male contestualizzata - e quindi, spesso, oscura -, hanno ricevuto infatti la medesima definizione.
Riscritture ‘barocche’ di Didone saranno quindi le molteplici declinazioni del personaggio all'interno della produzione letteraria del Tardoantico e, in un secondo momento, dell’epoca propriamente barocca (nell’uso storico convenzionalmente attribuito al termine).

In this essay on Virgil's Aeneid, I explore the role of memory and historical consciousness as the basis for the general formation of the epic and the outcome of the interpersonal events between Aeneas and Dido, and Aeneas and Turnus. More specifically, I argue that the image on the shield of Aeneas forged by Vulcan is the key to understanding the imagery and story arc of Virgil's grand epic.

En el libro IV de Eneida se desarrolla la trágica relación amorosa de Dido y Eneas. Ella, consumida por las llamas del amor, decide quitarse la vida con la espada de Eneas que él le había obsequiado. Esta figura femenina, construida por Virgilio como una mujer fuera del sistema para el imaginario romano, reúne un conjunto de características propio de un modelo genérico opositor: extranjera, reina de Cartago, viuda que avasalla la condición de univira, practicante de la magia y suicida, al tomar la decisión de acabar con su vida tal como lo haría un soldado romano.
De todas estas notas, se llevará a cabo el análisis de la relación de Dido con las artes mágicas a lo largo de dos episodios: el conjuro de encantamiento para retener a Eneas y el ritual mágico que antecede a su suicidio donde decide maldecir al héroe. A partir de la consideración de que el hecho mágico se funda en una ley de simpatía —las cosas actúan recíprocamente a distancia mediante una atracción secreta regida por principios de semejanza o de contacto—, se procurará reconocer cómo funcionan, según esos condicionantes fácticos, ambos rituales. Estos, cuyos fines están dirigidos a la obtención de un beneficio individual o a la imposición de una voluntad personal, se diferencian de una ceremonia religiosa en la que debe prevalecer el beneficio del pueblo o del estado. Por lo tanto, desde esta perspectiva se busca visibilizar a Dido como una figura transgresora, quien por ser practicante de la hechicería, se convierte en un individuo condenable para la sociedad romana.

Didone, esule regina fenicia, fonda Cartagine, accoglie Enea, profugo da Troia, se ne innamora follemente e, abbandonata, si toglie la vita per aver tradito la fedeltà alla memoria del marito Sicheo. Questa è la storia che racconta Virgilio nel IV libro dell’Eneide: una commovente tragedia incastonata nell’epos, forse il testo più celebre e fortunato della letteratura di Roma. Esisteva però un’altra Didone,  l’eroina del mito – precedente all’Eneide – che si gettava tra le fiamme proprio per non venir meno al primo vincolo nuziale. Di qui il paradosso della sua fama: da eroina della fedeltà coniugale, Didone diviene, grazie a Virgilio, protagonista di una tragedia di amore e di abbandono. Ma, nelle riscritture del mito, il dialogo allusivo tra le “due Didoni” riaffiora, a partire da Ovidio, ogni qual volta un autore vorrà scontrarsi con Virgilio (e con la tradizione culturale “ufficiale” che si identifica con la sua poesia). Exemplum morale in Boccaccio, tormentata eroina intertestuale nelle rinnovate forme tragiche del Rinascimento, amante moderna che inaugura la rivoluzione del melodramma settecentesco, straziante simbolo o allegoria nello sperimentalismo della poesia del Novecento: infinite e sempre nuove le sfumature nelle quali Didone si rivela nei testi di questo volume. Poiché inesauribile è la ricchezza della poesia da cui proviene, e universale la sua tragedia d’amore.

Within operatic translation, three translation forms can be distinguished: libretto translation, surtitling and singing translation (intended for performance, often referred to as vocal translation) (Desblache 2004). In this paper, I will focus on the latter form, applying a translation model based on strategic classification of different musical styles within opera.
The model I use builds on Peter Low’s concept of the “pentathlon principle” (2003). He distinguishes five major elements that are relevant within the process of vocal translation: singability, meaning, naturalness (of the target language), rhythm and rhyme. Low, who focuses on the classical genre of the art song or Lied, argues that for every song, the vocal translator must assess how these categories are incorporated within source text and music by analysing the synthesis of musical and narrative elements of the song. This can serve as a basis for the balance of these elements to be achieved in the target text and, consequently, the translation strategy.
In this study I apply Low’s conceptual framework to opera, combining it with the notion that within opera, different musical sub-forms such as recitative, arias and choral parts require different translation strategies and present strongly divergent challenges for the vocal translator, due to the inherent differences in dramatic function of these forms (cf. Brecher 1911). This notion is hardly new, but seems to be overlooked in current opera translation practice. I will argue that Low’s framework can and should be used as a flexible hierarchical structure in which some elements will take priority over others, depending on dramatic function of the specific part of the opera. A preliminary awareness of this hierarchy in both source and target text can help the translator during the rest of the translation process, both within the operational and the evaluative stages (Naaijkens 2011). In order to establish an adequate hierarchy of Low’s categories for opera translation, I propose a top-down model, starting with a distinction of the different musical forms within the opera. The translator must then progress to more detailed analyses on a textual/narrative, musical and musico-poetic level of each part, considering the interaction between text and vocal line. A principal characteristic of opera is the principle of ‘word painting’, the use of musical properties to underline or illustrate textual elements (Desblache). Furthermore, especially in opera, translation choices will be influenced by many other contextual (musical) and extra-textual factors.
I will apply my model, which combines traditional conceptions of vocal translation with modern theories and strategies, to the opera Dido and Aeneas as a case-study. Purcell’s masterpiece, like most operas from the Baroque and classical eras, relies heavily on the distinct alternation of musical styles for dramatic purposes, and Purcell’s music is equally heavy in word painting. I will apply my model to the opera as a whole before focusing on three specific musical forms: one aria (the famous ‘When I am Laid in Earth’), one chorus and one recitative, showing how a theoretically based translation strategy can aid in all stages of the translation process.

Il volume offre un compendio ragionato intorno alle principali questioni e agli studi critici relativi alle 'imagines' di Didone, ovvero alle diverse ‘storie’ del personaggio che, nei secoli successivi a Virgilio, sono state variamente recuperate e, spesso, ‘combinate’ tra loro. Gli spunti relativi alle sopravvivenze del mito negli autori cristiani d’Africa costituiscono un ulteriore strumento utile allo studio del 'Fortleben' di Didone.
La sezione dei “Materiali” offre inoltre una galleria di testi (con traduzioni in lingua italiana) raccolti allo scopo di fornire un quadro esaustivo non solo delle fonti principali ma anche delle successive riscritture del mito didoniano nella poesia latina classica e tardoantica.

This paper focuses on the two similes that frame Dido’s story in the Aeneid, the former comparing her to Diana who overtops all the nymphs surrounding her (1, 498-502), the latter to the Moon only dimly visible among the clouds (6, 453- 454), examining to what extent the Diana simile involves hints to the Moon as well. Moreover I shall demonstrate that in Iopas’ song at the end of book 1 there is no reference to Dido, but the real celestial body is the subject involved.

The epochal changes in the rediscovery of the Ancient are also refl ected at the local level
by monuments and sites. The cultural rediscovery of the territory of Albano owes much to the
continuity given by the study of classical texts. In particular, Virgilio’s Aeneid creates an almost
uninterrupted link between past and present. Retracing the history that brought different characters
to chronology, education and origin to be interested in Albanian antiquities, helps to renew the
meaning and the role that archeology can have today.

Published version available here:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/classical-quarterly/article/looking-edgeways-pursuing-acrostics-in-ovid-and-virgil/269DC39A17ADB2BBC6E7916EE8235D89/share/1912470be86a9432b51addd60c477fe5f3c254c0

The article available for download on Academia.edu is the prepublication version.

In the article I propose a reading practice whereby we actively seek out acrostics in the same way that we actively seek out allusions. I then apply this approach to the key moments in the Aeneid and Metamorphoses, and find it to be a productive one, revealing several new acrostics and telestics, and shedding light on some previously discovered ones. These include an Ovidian authorial signature NASO in telestic form at the moment that Amor is introduced in the Metamorphoses; the acrostic NITIDO in the middle of the Metamorphoses, picking up on the opening of Book 8 and continuing Ovid's competitive engagement in the Met with Horace's Ars Poetica; the acrostic AUSUM in a middle (there are several) of the Aeneid, looking back to the use of audeo and its cognates to describe Vergil's scholarly activity in the Georgics; Vergil's reproduction of Aratus' LEPTE acrostic (and an ARATEA anagram) in his own mini-cosmos, the Shield of Aeneas, at a moment of intense metapoetic self-reference; and two acrostic links between Dido, Lavinia and Ajax and their shared sense of shame.

This essay identifies a pervasive vein of compound, critical imitation in Dido, Queen of Carthage as the foundation for its theatrical parody.  The play assumes and exploits audience familiarity with both Virgil’s and Ovid’s poetic accounts of the Aeneas-Dido story and the fall of Troy:  in the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and the Heroides.  Marlowe imitates Ovid’s poetic strategies of manipulating Virgil’s Aeneid for lyrical and ironic effect.  I suggest he also bears in mind strategies of imitation employed by Lucan’s De Bello Civili (Pharsalia).  Analyzing the dynamic relationship between verbal imitatio and dramatic spectacle in Dido, I draw two conclusions about the play’s poetics of compound imitation.  First, Dido interrogates the Aeneid’s rhetoric about Aeneas and his destiny, skeptical of its investment in martial virtus, thus suggesting some degree of satire regarding English military campaigns and exploitation of the Troy legacy in the 1580s.  Yet, the play complicates that critical vein with self-consciousness about its own nature as imitatio:  about how its own methodology for interrogating and deflating Virgil’s epic determines the boundaries of its creative license with the Aeneas-Dido story.  Marlowe’s Aeneas and Dido characters both face the quasi-tragical anagnorisis that they are victims of their classical sources.

The purpose of my paper is to illustrate the different female typologies which feature in the theatre of the mime of the Late Roman Republic, and especially in the plays of the famous mimographer Decimus Laberius, as these are exemplified in his extant fragments. I discuss important aspects and stereotypical features of this realistic comic form and I demonstrate the artistic sophistication of this sub-theatrical genre, the literary force of which, often irreverent and unkind towards women, enables the audience to think, through the medium of laughter, about topical and socially relevant issues.

Resumen: En este estudio realizamos un estado de la cuestión de las diferentes interpretaciones de la Dido virgiliana para luego relacionarlas con cómo el mito se fue reescribiendo en las distintas épocas de la literatura española, dando lugar a un personaje que terminó por quitarle protagonismo a Eneas y se convirtió en una figura clave de la literatura universal.

Abstract: At this work, we try to overview Virgil's character Dido state of affairs regarding to different interpretations. Nextly, this will be connected with the different rewritings of the myth throughout Spanish Literature's movements. To conclude with, we will see how the character won importance over Eneas and became one of the greatest in Universal Literature.

In Verg. Aen. 4, 415 I propose to link frustra with moritura and to take moritura as an appositive participle expressing Dido’s purpose, as considered from the narrator’s point of view (‘sympathy’): she is «vainly ready to die». I discuss then a significant parallel for frustra + participle of mori in Stat. Theb. 9, 726-727, where I suggest to take frustra along with morientis and to print abfuerit instead of the vulgate adfuerit.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the elegiac framework of Epigr. Bob. 45, a fascinating epigram in the collection of the Epigrammata Bobiensia, which may be briefly described as “Dido’s palinode”, and in which the Carthaginian queen retracts her earlier sentiments and clarifies that she has, in fact, never met Aeneas. The epigram in question belongs to the literary genre of ecphrastic poetry, as I have argued elsewhere (see «Sileno», 41/1-2, 2015, pp. 277-304). The present study is divided into four sections: (1) the Latin text of the carmen with a critical apparatus, (2) the interpretative paradigms of Ovid and Vergil, (3) the influence of Propertius on the author of the epigram as shown through three examples taken from Book 4 of Propertius’ elegies, and (4) the analysis of the ‘inscriptional intermediality’ of this poem. My intention is to show, first, how the ‘genre epigram’ is an open rhetorical system and, second, that it is possible, as a result of this openness , not only to recognize in Epigr. Bob. 45 an ‘elegiac movement’ (to paraphrase slightly Antonio La Penna’s famous definition about the “epigrammatic movement and rhythm in Propertius’ elegies”) but also to delineate the different ways in which the various literary models I have discussed previously were re-codified in the late antique literary culture. || Key Words: «Dido, Vergil, Propertius, Ovid, Inscriptions, Latin Elegy, Ancient Epigram, Late Antiquity, Intertextuality, Epigrammata Bobiensia».

Here's a paper I delivered at the SSCM (Society for Seventeenth Century Music) conference in New York in April 2012 (an amazing conference with generous and positive participants and presenters). The paper argues for a new idea in the dating debate around Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas, seeing it as a centenary celebration of the defeat of the Spanish armada in July and August 1588. After the conference, I sent it to a journal and waited two years for any word. When they did get back to me at all it was to say that it could not be accepted (and with an apology for the delay). Reading the anonymous readers comments and re-reading my own work, I am still confident enough of my arguments. So here it is.

From the tenth through the twelfth centuries some manuscripts containing Virgil's poems contain the musical notation known as neumes. Thereafter such notation of Virgil apparently ceases for centuries. The neumes (and singing) may have fallen by the wayside as new practices developed of singing Latin rhythmic poems or vernacular songs based on Virgil, rather than excerpts from Virgil's own quantitative poetry. In prefaces to the Paraclete Hymnbook Peter Abelard quotes observations by Heloise on the need for a more regular syllable count than in quantitative hymns. Virgilian reception and musical notation may have evolved together away from quantitative Latin.

In un commento di Servio all’Eneide (IV, v. 36), la regina fenicia Didone, mitica fondatrice di Cartagine e uno dei personaggi iconici dell’immaginario collettivo occidentale per merito dell’Eneide di Virgilio, è definita come virago, ovvero colei che agisce come un uomo.
La sua vicenda conosce due tradizioni; quella originale, che risale a Timeo di Tauromenio (III sec. a.C.), che non menziona il suo rapporto con Enea e ne celebra esclusivamente il carattere volitivo e regale, e l’altra, celeberrima, creata dall’arte poetica virgiliana, che fa dell’amore infelice per l’eroe troiano la causa fondante dell’inimicizia tra Cartagine e Roma. La sua fama perdura poi nel tempo e in tutti i campi dell’arte e della letteratura.
Una serie monetale romano-provinciale battuta in Fenicia nel III secolo d.C. è dedicata a Didone, dove si ripropongono azioni che di regola sono attribuiti a personaggi maschili, e che invece sono qui proprie di una donna, senza alcuna traccia della sua tragica vicenda sentimentale, quella che ne fa una donna che per amore rinuncia a se stessa.

RESUMEN El mito de Dido y Eneas es conocido, entre otros aspectos, por las distintas pasiones que desata el anuncio del troyano con respecto a su partida de Cartago. Las pasiones de este episodio se han analizado, principalmente, en la Eneida de Virgilio. Por tal razón, en el presente trabajo se estudian desde otra perspectiva: la de Ovidio en las Heroidas. Este artículo pretende enfocarse en las pasiones compasión, vergüenza y temor presentes en la epístola VII de la obra a partir de una interpretación retórica de las mismas. ABSTRACT The myth of Dido and Aeneas is known, among other aspects, for the different passions provoked by the announcement of the departure of the Trojan hero from Carthage. The passions of this episode have been analyzed, mainly in Virgil's Aeneid. For this reason, in the present paper they study from another perspective, that is, the one presented in Ovid's Heroids. Therefore, this article focuses on the following feelings: compassion, shame and fear in the VII epistle of the work from a rhetorical interpretation.

The myth of Aeneas lends itself to various uses in the cultural production of Greek and Roman antiquity. From the epic of the family, expanded to become a collective myth after his arrival in Lazio, to the description of human psychology suspended between sense of pleasure and duty, the figure of Aeneas and his companions has fed unforgettable pages of literature and figurative patterns which still reveal today the strength of the myths that have been used to build the history.

La campaña de Carlos V contra Túnez tuvo una organización publicitaria y unos resultados en la proyección de la imagen imperial que han sido considerados fundamentales en la evolución de la propaganda posterior del reinado. A través de las relaciones relativas a esta acción militar, se estudian sus consecuencias en la creación literaria que van de Garcilaso de la Vega y los poetas del círculo napolitano (Martirano, Minturno y otros) hasta la producción de romances y edición de pliegos, con derivaciones en los temas literarios que superan con mucho el propósito inicial

At Aen. 4.65-66, heu, uatum ignarae mentes! quid uota furentem, / quid delubra iuuant? Vergil reproaches the seers for being ignorant of the power of Dido's love: religious practices are not useful to her for deciding the course of her actions. Since the phrase has been frequently misunderstood, the history of the interpretation of this passage is reviewed from Servius up to the present day. ., This article focuses on the history of the interpretation of two problematic lines from Aeneid 4, lines 65-66, heu, uatum ignarae mentes! quid uota furentem, / quid delubra iuuant? This is from the section in which Dido offers sacrifices and consults the gods about her project of marrying Aeneas and joining together the Carthaginian and the Roman people. In 1993, James O'Hara published an important article on this scene, and I will take my cue from his treatment of the issues raised by this sentence. The issues are (1) whether the exclamation heu, uatum ignarae mentes! means "ah, ignorant minds of prophets!, " with uatum as possessive genitive, or "ah, minds ignorant of the prophets!, " with uatum as objective genitive; and (2) in either of these cases, what is the exact meaning of the sentence,

Our 2020 Symposium Peregrimun was postponed due to covid, like so many other conferences.  When we realized that 2021 was not feasible, we initially delayed the conference until 2022.  However, because we wanted to see each other and exchange personal and professional greetings, we changed out minds and decided to host a special Zoom event, different than our normal procedures.  In 2020 we invited participants to share their work in progress, whether it be books or articles in some stage of completion.  We hope next year we will meet in Messina, Sicily and resume a common theme for the conference.  The presentations which drew the most commentary were Charles King, Gaius, Sandra Blakely, Harry Walker, Kresimir Vukovic, and Benjamin Scolnic.  It was good to see old and many new faces at the Symposium.