The Tragic Consequences Of Love In Virgil's Aeneid

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Love is like a bright star — twinkling, magical, and often times the only sign of light in an otherwise dark expanse, a mechanism against the banalities of everyday life. Yet, like the L.A. smog that engulfs the glowing, shimmering celestial bodies from a hungry viewer’s eyes, love is also potentially all-encompassing, blinding, and tragic. For centuries, bards, poets, storytellers, and artists across all spectrums have dedicated their work to capturing both the darkest corners and most luminous windows of love, which has in turn captivated peoples’ hearts and imaginations like a spell that spans generations. Yet the tales of lovers lost and lovers scorned, the ones bearing the most forlorn and woeful storylines, have made the most lasting
Dido, the powerful Queen of Carthage, is quite literally struck by Cupid’s arrow per the request of Venus and reduced to the state of a lovesick girl infatuated with Aeneas, a Trojan hero whose own life carries immense tragedy due to the fall of Troy. As Juno describes in lines 101 and 102, “Dido’s burning with passion, and she’s drawn the madness into her very bones.” She pursues a romance with Aeneas at the cost of her own reputation, as she had previously sworn she would remain faithful to the memory of her husband. The pair consummate their relationship in a cave outside of wedlock, but shortly after, Jupiter sends Mercury to remind Aeneas that it is not his destiny to remain in Carthage with Dido, but to travel to Italy and birth his empire. Aeneas reluctantly leaves, despite Dido’s desperate pleas for him to stay. Any sense of duty Dido has as a queen to her people is wiped out, as she is blind with passion and heartbreak. In true tragic form, she kills herself as a result of Aeneas’s departure, stabbing herself with a sword on top of a funeral pyre. Ovid’s telling is significantly less detailed, but holds the same results: the burning, ardent love between Aeneas and Dido ends with Aeneas’s departure and Dido’s haste suicide. In other words,

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