Love: Emotional Warfare

Love: Emotional Warfare

“She’d speak her heart but her voice chokes, mid-word./ Now at dusk she calls for the feast to start again,/ madly begging to hear again the agony of Troy,/ to hang on his lips again, savoring his story./”(4.96-99). Love is an overwhelming feeling. To long for someone to speak, hear a voice, or just to see a smile is a gift in the eyes of a person stricken with love. In The Aeneid, an epic written by Virgil (translated by Robert Fagles), The main plot point is for Aeneas to find Rome. In his quest, there are mentions of war and Fate, even Gods and destiny. But all of these things seem to be external forces. What about the internal equivalent of war, such as a conflict of love? Does Virgil portray it as such? Or at least shows that love leads to consequences matching war? Maybe he includes these love subplots just for the reader to better relate to the character?

Virgil includes many examples of love, and most of them end in tragedy. Just one of the many examples is of Dido and Aeneas’ failed relationship, ending in suicide. Dido gets shot with Cupid’s arrow, and falls for Aeneas. However, this seems to turn into an obsessive, one sided relationship. We get to watch as Dido slowly falls into madness as Aeneas is coerced into leaving her lands. As Aeneas leaves, she goes on and on, cursing him and becoming more crazed, sending her mind into chaos. Quickly, thinking of a way to cease this anguish, she decides to kill herself. Internally, she was fighting a war. Maybe not physically equivalent to those fought with swords and bows, but it ended in death all the same.

We get to check in on Dido later on in the journey of Aeneas. She is seen in the underworld, reunited with her late husband, Sychaeus. As Aeneas tries to meet Dido’s gaze, she simply turns away, her features described as “no more moved by his pleas as he talked on/than if she were set in stony flint or Parian marble rock.” (6.546-547). It seems that Dido is no longer under the spell, and she finally is able to move on in the afterlife. Unfortunately, ‘moving on’ also means ‘making an enemy’. “At last she tears herself away, his enemy forever,/fleeing back to the shadowed forest where Sychaeus,/her husband long ago, answers all her anguish,/meets her love with love.” (6.548-551). Aeneas now has to live with the burden of a lost love - and a new enemy - and Dido is reunited with her husband. But we cannot assume that that relationship is not ruined by her new history with Aeneas. Just by the short time with each other, Sychaeus and Dido could now be struggling, and Dido is now forever affected by the past.

While the majority of us haven’t been able to experience war and its tragedies firsthand, we probably have all experienced love and heartbreak. We cannot directly relate to some of the characters based solely on them being portrayed as warminds. Virgil must have needed another ‘empathy anchor’. Including these stories (specifically the advancement of Dido’s character), we are able to relate and truly see these people as human. We all have that one person that we’ve fallen for. The one person that simply hearing them talk, or seeing their perfect smile would brighten our day. Then, something happens… and we go through heartbreak. We curse them, and think dramatic thoughts. We try anything to move on, but are forever burdened with that memory of them. Fortunately for us, we are still here to be able to truly move on (and not be stuck in the underworld with your dead husband…), but it affects us just the same as it affected Dido. The reader can now see these people as more than tools to further the plot, but people who feel the same feelings as you and I.

Virgil writes about love. He allows us to interpret the importance of it; whether or not it is the internal equivalent to war, whether or not it has consequences as hurtful as war, and whether it allows the reader to better relate to a character. Love can hurt, and drive people to drastic measures. It caused significant conflict within Dido, caused death, and caused Aeneas to have a new enemy.

Comments

  1. UnknownDecember 5, 2018 at 6:42 PM

    I was very intrigued with this post as i found myself able to relate and i feel that most who read it will feel the same. Virgil was very influenced by love in the Aeneid but this book also had a lot of tragedy which often comes with love. War was another topic in the Aeneid and in this blog displays this very well in my opinion. The tragedy covered the most in this post was the suicide of Dido which was caused by Aeneas leaving her. As said in this post she honestly went crazy over him because she was in love and love itself caused her death.

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