D.Let’s face it, we all felt bad, the first time at school we were told the story of Dido, famous in the classical myth. It started so well, almost a fairy tale, a romantic interlude between stormy navigationslong and terrible battles, divine spite and cruel killings: Aeneas, the fugitive prince returning from the destruction of Troyson of nothing little bit less than Venus and a mortal, he is shipwrecked in Carthage and falls in love with his queen, a young and beautiful widow, Dido. And not only handsome, but also very, very smart: she is the creator of that trick of cutting the leather into strips so thin that they can be used to outline a huge perimeterwhen the Libyan king Iarba tells her, believing himself smart, that he will give her as much land as an ox hide contains … Beautiful and smart.
Aeneas and Dido, like a romantic fiction
Joseph Stallaert – La mort de Didon. Created: circa 1872. Source: Wikimedia
Great couple, Aeneas and Dido. Oh, finally some love. Even Aeneas a widower, because his wife Creusa lost her on the way running away from her city (which in hindsight should have already made us understand that it was not necessary to trust much), so both with a free heart: better than like this!
In fact they love each other, she falls in love really lostso much so that he says that beautiful phrase to his sister Anna: when I look at this stranger «rI know the signs of the ancient flameThat is, the passion she had felt for her deceased husband Sicheo. After all Aeneas is very fascinatingwith a dramatic past, and as if that were not enough, the goddesses (Juno and mother Venus) are also brought in, making them seized by a storm after a hunting trip so that they take refuge together in a cave and voila, the straw near the fire etcetera etcetera …
In short, how can you not understand Dido’s transport? In all of this, Aeneas shows that he is also up to the challenge of love, but he does not give up on his balance. More, when Jupiter sends him to say who cannot stay flannel in Carthage because he has a mission to fulfill in Italy, where he will found a new city, he, being very pius (the pious Aeneas!) that is loyal to the will of Olympus (and God forbid, being the son of a goddess!) responds like Garibaldi: I obey. AND expects Dido to understand. Sorry, dear, it was nice, but duty calls me.
In the 1971 television version of the Aeneid, Aeneas was Giulio Brogi and Greek actress Olga Karlatos played Dido. The theme song of the program was her song that can be heard here:
End not happy at all
She argues, argues, puts his back to the wall. He replies with another famous phrase: “Italiam non sponte sequor ” I’m not going to Italy by my will. And of course, “I don’t do it for my own sake”, as grandmothers embroidered on their nightgowns, but for the gods, for the memory of their father Anchises and for their son Ascanius and so on. But the result is always the same: hello, Dido, goodbye and thank you.
What are you doing? As the ships go away with Aeneas on board with his smile more like a good boy, convinced that he is right and already focused on her noble Italian mission, Dido commits suicide in a very theatrical way before stabbing herself with the sword that Aeneas left her (he too, nice farewell present, refined psychologist!) and then throwing himself on the burning pyre, cursing Aeneas and his descendants, thus laying the foundations for the proverbial enmity between Rome and Carthage.
But how, a love story started so well ends in tragedy? Not only, but is the attempt to make Dido look a bit crazy, or at least like a hysterical and exaggerated female?
Dido climbing the funeral pyre (or pile) in a scene from “Storie da Virgilio” by Reverend Alfred J. Church, MA, with illustrations from drawings by Bartolomeo Pinelli (1781-1835). Published by Seeley, Jackson & Halliday, London, in 1879. Dido is the founder and first queen of Carthage in North Africa, and is also known as Elissa. She falls in love with Aeneas but he leaves her; in her pain a funeral pyre climbs up and falls on a sword given to her by Aeneas. During his journey into the Underworld, Aeneas meets her “shadow” or ghost and she avoids him.
Dido was in good company
Well, in the role of the seduced and abandoned of the myth, the queen of Carthage is not alone. Also Jason, the leader of the Argonauts, after having been helped by Medea in obtaining the Golden Fleece he thought it best to fall in love with another and then to blame Aphrodite in the face of the grievances of the betrayed sorceress, who, as is known, took her very badly: she gave her the face Maria Callas in a famous film by Pasolini of 1969.
And what about Ariadne, who even inspired our way of saying “leave in the lurch” after the beautiful Theseuswhom she had helped kill the Minotaur, did he drop her on the island of Naxos? They may have been heroes too, all these mythical seducers, but certainly not great gentlemen …
Dido buys land for the founding of Carthage. Woodcut after an engraving (from Historische Chronica Frankfurt, 1630) by Mathias Merian the Elder (Swiss-German engraver and publisher, 1593 – 1650), published in 1864. (via Getty Images)
From Enea to Peppino
“Woman is as mobile as a feather in the wind”, in short, we freely translate, paraphrasing Rigoletto and Verdi’s librettist. The woman, poor thing, not that fella of Aeneas who first takes advantage and then sets sail for other shores. And the stereotype of the seduced and abandoned lasts until the sixtieswhen that genius of the director Pietro Germi finds the moral and civil courage to tell an exemplary story in his famous film set in that Italy to reach which Aeneas left Dido.
In Seduced and abandonedreleased in 1964, the seduced is Agnese, played by a very young Sandrelli, and the seducer is Peppino, with the character face of Aldo Puglisi, in the context of a hypocritical Sicily dominated by a grotesque sense of honor.
Let’s reverse the prospects
And we gnaw our dissatisfaction with these obvious as well as mythical injustices. Until today. Because a book has just come out that overturns perspectives.
Marilù Oliva wrote it, an author who knows about myth. She is fresh from the great success of another classic female reinterpretation, The Odyssey told by Penelope, Circe, Calipso and the others (Solferino 2020) and had the courage and the competence to answer the question that many of us have asked ourselves, more or less consciously: did it really go like this? “We are almost all / and we were disappointed by the way in which a queen with such a resolute character ended her life and abandoned the project for which she was committed to her people,” says Marilù. Dido’s suicide, although attested by African legend, «clashes with the characterbut it fits perfectly into the vision that Virgil, who wrote the Aeneid, had of the woman: varium et mutabile semper femina“.
But what if …?
The Aeneid of Dido by Marilù Oliva, Solferino
But returning to Dido, by now we have the flea in our ear: Marilù Oliva in her book Dido’s Aeneid tells us another truth. A possible, even probable truth. That Dido “already a warrior, queen, traveler, she who challenged sovereigns and peoples” fell in love, yes, but perhaps not with Aeneas, because Aeneas was not that great after all; And that she didn’t kill herself for love at all, it wasn’t she who died … And there is more: even that the man who leaves for Italy to carry out his mission is not Aeneas and perhaps he is not even a man, but rather … Ah, we had always said it, that it wasn’t possible, that it wasn’t right. Marilù, but this is the revolution. This is the revenge of the seduced and abandoned of all times. Something that will make people argue!
She laughs, her eyes sparkling. “Forgive me, after all Virgil also committed an enormous forcing, inventing the love story between Aeneas and Dido: from a chronological point of view, their meeting is incompatiblesince, according to some scholars, the Phoenician queen lived in the 9th century BC, while Aeneas dates back to the time of the Trojan War, which can be placed between the 13th and 12th centuries BC! “
Wow, a nice time jump … This book is to be read page by page, to discover the new Dido that will come out of this review. “Who could blame this new beginning?” I’m too curious. Because, as Marilù says, “There is a breath of Dido in each of us”.
The unforgettable phrases of Dido
«Knowing pain too, I know how to help those who need it». Dido
“I recognize the signs of the ancient flame.” Dido
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