Love and Its Critics

Love and its Critics From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden

MICHAEL BRYSON RYSON A AN ND A RPI MOVSESIAN

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82

Love and its Critics

The comrades will scatter and be covered with opaque night: into a cave will Dido and the Trojan chief vanish. I will be present, and, if your will is firm, in a stable and proper marriage and wedlock, this will be a wedding.

Once word spreads of the love affair, as “Rumor runs through Libya’s great cities”,124 the common people, King Iarbus (long a suitor for Dido’s love), and the poem itself turn against the idea of the “marriage” into which Juno has bound the pair. The people’s talk turns sour and critical, turning the night in the cave into something sordid and “shameful”: venisse Aenean Troiano sanguine cretum, cui se pulchra viro dignetur iungere Dido; nunc hiemem inter se luxu, quam longa, fovere regnorum immemores turpique cupidine captos. haec passim dea foeda virum diffundit in ora. 125 Aeneas is come, born of Trojan blood, with whom in marriage fair Dido deigns to join; now, between them, in luxury they waste the length of winter, reigning heedlessly, enthralled by shameful desire. These tales the foul goddess spreads through men’s mouths.

Soon enough (too soon, from Dido’s perspective), Jove orders Aeneas to leave Carthage and sail across the Mediterranean in search of the shores where he will lay the foundations for the “kingdom of Italy and Rome”.126 Immediately, Aeneas “burns to depart in flight, and relinquish that pleasant land”,127 strategizing not how to leave, but how to make his excuses to Dido: “Ah, what could he do? What can he dare say now to the furious queen / to pacify her? What opening speech could he use?” 128 Aeneas is more concerned with how to manipulate Dido into approving of his sudden plan than he is with the effect his leaving will have on her. 124 125 126 127 128

“Libyae magnas it Fama per urbes” (ibid. , 4.173). Ibid. , 4.191–95. “regnum Italae Romanaque” (ibid. , 4.275). “ardet abire fuga dulcisque relinquere terras” (ibid. , 4.348). “heu quid agat? quo nunc reginam ambire furentem / audeat adfatu? quae prima exordia sumat?” (ibid. , 4.283–84).

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Love and its Critics

desine meque tuis incendere teque querelis; Italiam non sponte sequor.130 I will, because of many things which you are able to recount, never, queen, deny that you are deserving, nor shall I regret my memory of Dido while I am mindful of myself, while breath reigns in this body. […] But now of great Italy has Grynean Apollo spoken, Italy, his Lycian lots order me to take hold of; this must be my love, this my fatherland. […] Stop inflaming both of us with your complaints; I do not go to Italy of my own free will.

Virgil works especially hard here to make Aeneas sympathetic, despite the fact that such a move comes at the cost of making him seem weak and dishonest, denying the fact that he chooses to obey power—as he once did with Priam, and as he now does with Jove. He is at pains to deny that his relationship with Dido is a marriage—“I never held out the conjugal torch, / nor ever pretended to such a contract” 131—despite the fact that Juno calls it a marriage from the very beginning. Virgil is so eager to excuse Aeneas, in fact, that his poem blames Dido for impropriety in getting involved in a relationship arranged by the gods who call the action “marriage” (this, in a Rome in which Augustus Caesar is legislating private relationships): pronuba Iuno dant signum; fulsere ignes et conscius aether conubiis summoque ulularunt vertice Nymphae. ille dies primus leti primusque malorum causa fuit; neque enim specie famave movetur nec iam furtivum Dido meditatur amorem: coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam. 132

130 Ibid. , 4.333–37, 345–47, 359–60. 131 “nec coniugis umquam / praetendi taedas aut haec in foedera veni” (ibid. , 4.422–23). 132 Ibid. , 4.166–72.



Love and its Critics From the Song of Songs to Shakespeare and Milton’s Eden

Michael Bryson and Arpi Movsesian























































































































Love and Its Critics

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