ABSTRACT
Shannon (1929: 196) observed that, though Chaucer’s material in Dido was mainly from the Aeneid, his approach, sympathetic to Dido and hostile to Aeneas, is closer to the Letter of Dido in Ovid’s Heroides VII, but the latter point is true only in a general sense. Chaucer’s Dido and Aeneas are personalities of his own making as much as they are legacies from either Virgil or Ovid, and the sympathy Chaucer’s text shows to Dido differs in quality from Ovid’s, presenting her in a more dignified light. It is clear that the selection, omission, alteration and addition of material by Chaucer was carefully managed to produce a narrative design with its own structure and meanings. Readers will find it illuminating to compare Chaucer’s narrative with Aeneid Books I–IV for themselves, and different readers may come to different conclusions about the overall effect of Chaucer’s changes. Comparison with Chaucer’s earlier version in the House of Fame (HF) shows him departing here more radically and purposively from Virgil: this Legend version is far more tightly moulded and designed, in both its wording and its selection of details, to adumbrate a certain group of themes. 1 Those themes are the ideas and morality that shape the Legend as a whole rather than those of Virgil or Ovid. 2
