What is Marriage?
Book 4 of the Aeneid
To make sure Dido stays on Aeneas’s side, Venus sent Cupid to make her fall in love with him at the end of the first book of the Aeneid.
Now Dido starts pining over Aeneas, neglecting the work on the walls of Carthage and the training of her soldiers. That’s not hard to imagine, even without Cupid’s interference. He’s noble, god-fearing, an amazing warrior, and incredibly good-looking. Not to mention he’s got a fleet of sailors available to help out in case Carthage gets attacked by the neighbors. Dido has been staying faithful to her first love, the husband her brother murdered, but her sister, Anna, tells her she shouldn’t waste her youth on the dead.
If up to now, Juno has been playing villain, in this chapter, in my opinion, Venus fully takes over that role. Dido is nothing but collateral damage in her manipulation of Juno and her promotion of her son.
When Juno figures out what Venus has done, Venus takes up the same reasoning as Dido’s sister. Why not just go along with this? Let Aeneas marry Dido. He gets his new settlement for the Trojans and Juno gets Carthage to be a great city. What’s not to like? Oh, but Venus recommends Juno check with Jove first, just to make sure. Venus even offers to go along. Of course, Juno not only turns down Venus’s offer to help, she decides she doesn’t need to check with Jove either.
Venus and Juno work together to get Dido and Aeneas off by themselves in a cavern, and surprise! they become lovers. But are they married / pledged to each other? It looks to me like both Venus and Juno seem to think they are. Dido certainly thinks so. Even when Dido admits to being at fault, the fault she admits to is breaking her promise to her dead first husband not to remarry, not the fault of becoming Aeneas’s lover, which she never fails to call marriage or a pledge of marriage.
And yet, Virgil does seem to identify her fault as calling what happened in the cave “marriage.”
The question seems to revolve not so much around whether they were married as whether or not they were betrothed or pledged to be married. Clearly, there was still something else that had to happen for the marriage to be complete, because Aeneas later denies nothing except the intent to be married. His words are that he has not “carried the marriage torch of a husband” or “entered into any agreements,” which implies that some necessary ceremony has not occurred yet.
By the Roman law of Virgil’s time, if I understand it correctly, simply becoming lovers and living in the same house for long enough with the intent to be married, when there were no impediments, constituted marriage by “usus,” and required no additional ceremony. On the other hand, I imagine that the marriage of a queen and a noble was not normally done by “usus.”
Dido has reason to believe Aeneas also considers himself married to her. He moves into the palace, wears Phoenician purple, and re-starts the work on building the city that Dido had broken off when she was love-sick. Those don’t look like the actions of a man who’s planning on leaving, and they seem to fill the requirements of “usus.”
Meanwhile, rumors are flying. Dido apparently kept the neighboring kings at bay by saying she wasn’t going to marry anyone. But now, some upstart ends up on her shores and she’s married? One of the kings who was turned down, and has a hundred, well-provisioned altars to Jove, complains to him. At which point Jove notices that Aeneas is not making much progress towards Italy. Hmmm.
He sends Mercury down to tell Aeneas to get going. And from here, things go from bad to worse. While Aeneas tries to figure out how to tell Dido the bad news, he starts getting his fleet ready to sail, supposing he can keep Dido from finding out until he knows how to tell her.
That doesn’t work.
Dido confronts him. She expects him to at least admit they’re married or pledged, and show that leaving her breaks him up. In fact, it seems like Jove himself was worried that given enough time with Dido, Aeneas might actually decide Carthage was good enough and stay there.
The way he answers is true, respectful, and absolutely NOT the way to answer a lovestruck woman. It could almost come from a comedy of the 40’s or 50’s. Maybe I’ll do another post where I do a version of their dialogue.
He tells her that they’re both settling their people in a new place, and he has just as much right to find a place for his people in Italy as she had to do the same here in Carthage. Although Virgil says Aeneas loves Dido, Aeneas himself never tells her that, and in fact, points out that his first loves are his people and his duty. But also that he’s not leaving of his own free will, but because the gods command it.
The thing is, Aeneas does show emotion. He’s already shed tears in public, and even in front of Dido, for other reasons, so this doesn’t seem to be a case of needing to keep up a stoic front. The problem seems to be that he really does love her and really does want to stay. So to keep up his resolve, the more she pushes, the less emotion he shows.
This proves to Dido that she really did mean nothing to him, because otherwise there would be tears and lots of obvious emotion. She calls him all kinds of names, curses him, threatens him, and faints. He leaves the palace to get the ships ready to go.
In this whole confrontation, Virgil is clear to make Dido’s intransigence the fault of Venus through Cupid, and Aeneas’s intransigence the only option that piety and duty allow. Neither of them are guilty of any wrong-doing. In fact, when Dido kills herself at the end of this book, Virgil notes, through Juno, that she is dying before her time, without having deserved it.