ABSTRACT
The tightly self-limiting character of elegy’s hypothesized dichotomy between eros and the aristocratic persona becomes extremely evident if one compares the elegists’ lack of expressed self-killing intention with the self-murderous fury of Rome’s archetypal embodiment of erotic passion, Vergil’s Dido. Vergil’s depiction of the effects of amor upon the individual surpasses that of the love poets’ in both intensity and complexity. In Dido, the tension between passion and persona that animates elegy is heightened until it becomes a stark polarity, and it is this incompatibility that ultimately demands that she seek her own death by the end of Aeneid 4. The interaction of these two elements in the figure of Dido is, however, more nuanced than a simple antithetical clash. The force of amor in Dido does not just incite in her impulses that conflict with the terms by which she might validly constitute herself as a moral witness in society: it also operates at a more insidious level to distort systematically her subjective cognitive framework, so that Dido comes to perceive the satiation of her erotic longings as not only desirable, but congruent with this status as moral witness itself. The result is that Dido’s death, though intended to constitute for herself a valid social persona, does not do so coherently. In death, Dido is seen to be attempting both to display an awareness of her lapse from the ethical standards demanded of her, and to demonstrate that the erotic desires that led to this lapse form a valid aspect of her social position. Her expression of moral status before a social audience is thus irreconcilably conflicted, an outcome that, given Vergil’s assumption of an absolute equivalence between social role and the nature of the individual, reveals Dido’s experience of eros to be also that of total self-loss.
