CHAPTER IV.
DIDO.
The Carthaginian queen has been an eager listener to Æneas’s story. She is love-stricken—suddenly, and irremediably. The poet has thought it necessary to explain the fact by the introduction of the god of love himself, whom, in the shape of the young Ascanius, she has been nursing on her bosom. The passion itself is looked upon by the poet—and as we must suppose by his audience—as such a palpable weakness, that even in a woman (and it is to women almost exclusively, in ancient classical fiction, that these sudden affections are attributed) it was thought necessary to account for it by the intervention of some more than human influence. Either human nature has developed, or our modern poets understand its workings better. Shakespeare makes the angry Brabantio accuse the Moor of having stolen his daughter’s love
“By spells and medicines bought of mountebanks;”
but Othello himself has a far simpler and more natural explanation of the matter—
“She loved me for the dangers I had passed;—
This only is the witchcraft I have used.”
So it has been with Dido. But she is terribly ashamed of her own feelings. She finds relief in disclosing them to a very natural confidant—her sister Anna. She confesses her weakness, but avows at the same time a determination not to yield to it. The stranger has interested her deeply, after a fashion which has not touched her since the death of her husband Sichæus.
“Were not my purpose fixed as fate
With none in wedlock’s band to mate,—
. . . . . . . . . .
Were bed and bridal aught but pain,—
Perchance I had been weak again.”
But her sister—suiting her counsels, as all confidants are apt to do, to the secret wishes rather than to the professions of Dido—encourages the passion. Perpetual widowhood has a romantic sound, but is not, in Anna’s opinion, a desirable estate. Besides, in this newly-planted colony, surrounded as they are by fierce African tribes, an alliance with these Trojan strangers will be a tower of strength. The stout arm of such a husband as Æneas is much needed by a widowed queen. His visit—so Anna thinks—is nothing less than providential—
“’Twas Heaven and Juno’s grace that bore,
I ween, these Trojans to our shore.”
By all means let them detain their illustrious visitor with them as long as possible—his ships require refitting and his crews refreshment—and the result will not be doubtful.