Introduction to Ovid’s Vergil’s Dido (Heroides 7)

Here we will read an early literary response to Vergil’s Aeneid. Ovid (43 BCE – 17/18 CE) was the most ambitious of the poets in the generation after Vergil. He wrote across a range of poetic genres in elegy, tragedy, epic, and didactic. Ovid is best known for The Metamorphoses, a miraculous, epic retelling of (nearly) the entirety of Greco-Roman mythology in 15 books of poetry. 

Here we will read one of his earliest works, in which he imagines a letter written by Dido (in elegiac verse) during the brief interval between Aeneas’ departure and her suicide. If we look to identify the exact moment in the Aeneid when she would have written the letter, it comes at Aeneid 4.413-15 (ire iterum in lacrimas, iterum temptare precando / cogiture et supplex animos summittere amori…). Ovid’s Dido will hone in on the crucial disagreement between Dido and Aeneas: whether they were married (says Dido) or merely lovers (Aeneas)—but her letter ranges over her life story and her experience with Aeneas. Written within years of the publication of the Aeneid in 19 BCE, Ovid offers, via Dido, a harsh critique of Vergil’s eponymous hero. The poem is saturated with verbal echoes of the Aeneid; the commentary below will mention only those that reveal significant interpretive moments.

Your guide will be the commentary here; but you may wish to supplement it with other commentaries for other perspectives (e.g., Knox’s “Green & Yellow”).

ARGUMENTUM (SUMMARY)

Trōia ā Graecīs ēversa, Aenēās, Anchīsae et Veneris fīlius, postquam incendiō penātēs ēripuisset, vīgintī nāvibus mare ingreditur. Tempestāte autem iactātus, diūque circum multa lītora errāns, in Libyam est dēlātus: ubi tunc Dīdō, ut fingit Virgilius, Bēlī fīlia et Sichaeī Herculis sacerdōtis uxor, Tȳrō profecta, frātris Pygmaliōnis saevitiam et avāritiam fugiēns, novam urbem, Carthāginem, mōliēbātur. Ā quā Aenēās ūna cum sociīs līberāliter susceptus, amātus, in ēiusdem sēsē īnferiōrem cōnsuētūdinem dēmīsit. Cum autem Mercuriī monitū in Ītaliam, fātīs sibi prōmissam, nāvigāre parāret, Dīdō (ut quae cum maximē amāns et ārdēns omnia mōmenta expenderet) animum ējus praesentiēns, ā nāvigandī prōpositō eum revocāre studet: quod nōn impetrātō, ut saltem differat, praeceps iter, ōrat. Multīs autem frūstrā admōtīs precibus, tandem moritūra ad eum scrībit, ut mortis causam praebitam intelligat.

(P. Ovidii Nasoinus Omnia Opera Vol. 1 In usum Delphini, 132).