Dido, Aeneas and International Women’s Day
International Women’s Day (IWD), indeed any ‘day’ that celebrates anything, can be caricatured as anodyne and self-congratulatory – every business up and down the land puts out a few sponsored tweets. At Westminster, Corbyn makes a hash of it in the Commons, and Theresa May announces another meaningless ‘consultation’ on this or that social issue. Nothing from Donald Trump, yet.
So, if celebration days like this are to mean anything, they should provoke us into some genuine rethinking.
I thought I’d put my Classics degree to some use and retell the story one of the most famous women in Antiquity: Dido, founder and first queen of Carthage, wronged by the storyteller who first gave her life: Virgil.
Virgil’s Aeneas is a complex individual, at once stranded between the past and present, history and desire, destiny and chance. But his Dido is a narrow figure – a mere instrument of divine vengeance. Aeneas embodies the Roman project in all its turmoil, in all its pathos. For in Aeneas – in his choices, his hopes and fears – are written the great themes of Roman identity – the human cost of empire, the cost of political freedom, and the insecurity of a city-state that had gained absolute dominion over all the known world in just a couple of centuries.
At almost no point in the poem do we see Dido as the powerful Carthaginian Queen – she is little more than a paramour, a cipher for the instability of female desire. At the end of Book 1, Juno sends Cupid to infuse Dido with desire for Aeneas: “et vivo temptat praevertere amore / iam pridem resides animos desuetaque corda” (“with new life, new love, to re-possess / her Iong-since slumbering bosom’s Iost desire”). Dido is compelled into desiring Aeneas – she is a passive vessel for divine wrath at Aeneas. In the broader landscape of the poem, the Carthage episode is just that, an episodic digression from the primary story line – Aeneas’ march towards the founding of Rome.
The message is obvious: men make history; women experience it.
By the seventeenth century, things seem a bit more encouraging, all things being relative. Henry Purcell’s radical retelling of the story ‘Dido and Aeneas’ spins this in the opposite direction. As much as Aeneas is a bumbling clown, slow-minded and indecisive, Dido is strong-willed and eloquent. She makes history: Aeneas merely obeys the gods; Dido defies them. Aeneas’ arias are run of the mill; Dido’s genuinely sublime. She gives the final aria (‘Dido’s Lament’) and has the last word, as Aeneas fades into the background. Her words run: “When I am laid, am laid in earth, / May my wrongs create / No trouble, no trouble in thy breast; / Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate. / Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.”
If IWD is to mean anything, it is to remember the women of history as they were, not as passive functions of history, but as real, vital and complex actors on the stage of life.
And I haven’t even mentioned Pandora, Eve, Helen or Sappho …