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)

Ortō Trōiānō bellō ob raptam ā Paride Helenam, habitōque ā Graecīs conventū, invītus cōgitur Ulyssēs ad bellum proficīscī; in quā expedītiōne multa adeō et dēsignāvit praeclārē et gessit ut excīsae tandem Trōiae maxima illa laus ascribētur. Perāctā ultiōne, Trōiāque funditus ēversā, victōrēs Graecī in patriam redeuntēs, spoliīs hostium dītātī, indignātiōne laesae Minervae, variīs āctī sunt procellīs, adeō ut, multīs obrutīs, paucī post variōs errōrēs ēvāserint. Inter quōs Ulyssēs (ad quem haec epistola dīrigitur) decem errāns annōs, peragrāvit variās orbis partēs. Pēnelope igitur, ēius uxor, ignāra quidem ubi haereat, valdē tamen solicīta dē ēiusdem reditū, scrībit eī hanc epistolam, quā cum prīmīs ut redeat monet, maximē cum, et Trōiā iam excīsā, aliīsque reversīs, sōlus nūllam cūnctandī causam habeat. (P. Ovidii Nasoinus Omnia Opera Vol. 1 In usum Delphini, 43).