Dido and Aeneas, Roman fresco (10 BCE-45AD)
Monday
If women (and the men who support them) weren’t angry enough already about the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, our abuser-in-chief’s latest comments have added more fuel to the fire. As I’m currently reading The Aeneid, I recognize a comparable anger in those women whom Aeneas walks over in order to fulfill his destiny.
While Aeneas is founding the Roman Empire, Queen of Carthage Dido commits suicide and Queen of the Latins Amata goes mad. But if your destiny is to make sure you assert absolute control, whether over Italy or women’s bodies, then women are just collateral damage. Anita Hill was savagely attacked for her credible charges about Clarence Thomas, and some of the same machinery has been set in motion against Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
Virgil’s epic particularly interests me because of the power he finds in women’s anger, starting with Juno’s.
Juno is the first angry female we encounter. While Jupiter decrees that Aeneas must establish an empire, she is more concerned with issues of home and hearth, and the two come into conflict. To cite the most famous example, Dido falls in love with Aeneas after saving him following a traumatic shipwreck, and Juno, though Aeneas’s inveterate enemy, okays a union. Virgil instructs us to suspect her motives—she’s just doing it so that Aeneas won’t go on to found Rome—but since she’s the goddess of the hearth, she could also be interpreted as promoting their home life. Jupiter, however, sends his messenger Mercury to rouse Aeneas to his duty, just as Zeus sends Hermes to spur Odysseus into leaving Calypso. Caught by Dido as he sneaks away, Aeneas sounds like a sheepish husband breaking up with his mistress:
I have a point or two to make. I did not,
Believe me, hope to hide my flight by cunning;
I did not, ever, claim to be a husband,
Made no such vows. If I had fate’s permission
To live my life my way, to settle my troubles
At my own will, I would [stay here]…
But now
It is Italy I must seek, great Italy,
Apollo orders, and his oracles
Call me to Italy.
Dido is so angry that she not only commits suicide but, when Aeneas encounters her in the underworld, refuses to forgive him, despite his attempts to placate her. “Unwillingly, O queen, I left your kingdom,” he tells her, but “the gods’ demands…compelled me on.” He says that he never realized “my loss would cause so great a sorrow.”
Dido’s anger does not soften:
But the queen, unmoving
As flint or marble, turned away, her eyes
Fixed on the ground: the tears were vain, the words,
Meant to be soothing, foolish; she turned away,
His enemy forever…
Also unreasonable is Amata, who has trouble understanding why her husband Latinus would marry their daughter off to some guy who shows up on their shore claiming a great destiny (Aeneas). What’s wrong, she wants to know, with local boy Turnus. She tries to be reasonable but finds
Her words were vain: Latinus had decided.
She saw she could not move him.
Unfortunately for Latinus, Juno has sent one of the furies (Allecto, a.k.a. hatred uncontrolled) to stir up his wife. We learn what will come next when Juno delivers her instructions to Allecto:
As for the bride,
Bloodshed will be her dowry, and Bellona [goddess of war]
Matron of honor.
Virgil, like some of the elderly GOP senators, appears terrified by female anger, which takes its archetypal form in Allecto:
One of the evil goddesses, Allecto
Dweller in Hell’s dark shadows, sorrow-bringer,
Lover of gloom and war and plot and hatred.
Even her father hates her, even her sisters,
She takes so many forms, such savage guises,
Her hair a black and tangled next of serpents.
Unleashed, she can do more than a little damage, as Juno makes clear:
You have the power: when brother love each other
You know the way to arm them, set them fighting,
You can turn houses upside down with malice,
Bring under one roof the lash, the funeral torches,
You have a thousand names of evil-doing,
A thousand ways and means. Invent, imagine,
Contrive—break up the peace, sow seeds of warfare,
Let arms be what they want; in the same moment
Let arms be what they seize.
The results are impressive. First of all, Allecto drives the queen mad:
Poor queen, there was no limit to her raging,
Straeling [wandering as if mad], one end of the city to another….
Madness and guilt upon her,
She flies to the mountains, tries to hide her daughter
Deep in the woods, acts like a drunken woman,
Cries, over and over, “This girl is meant for Bacchus,
And not for any Trojans, only Bacchus
Is worthy of her.”
One image in particular captures how many American women feel goaded by the current administration:
You know how schoolboys, when a top is spinning
Snap at it with a whiplash, in a circle
Around any empty court, and keep it going,
Wondering the way it keeps on whirling,
Driven by blows in this or that direction.
So, through the midst of cities and proud people,
Amata drives, is driven.
Amata may not have the executive powers of her husband but she can stir up public sentiment:
And Rumor, flying over,
Excited the other wives to leave their houses.
They come with maddened hearts, with their hair flying
Their necks bare to the winds; they shriek to the skies
Brandish the vine-bound spears, are dressed as tigers,
Circle and wheel around their queen, whose frenzy
Tosses the burning pine-brand high, in gesture
To suit the marriage hymn: “O Latin mothers,
Listen, wherever you are: if any care
For poor Amata moves you, or any sense
Of any mother’s rights, come join the revels,
Loosen the hair, exult!”
Turnus, whom Amata wants for her son-in-law, at first remains aloof from the fray and dismisses a Juno priestess when she shows up in his dream:
Your age, old woman
Worn down, truth-weary [worn out by truth telling], harries you with worries,
Makes you ridiculous, a busybody,
Nervous for nothing in the wars of kings.
Back to the temple, mind your proper business,
Leave war and peace where they belong, with warriors.
The priestess, however, has been possessed by Allecto and gives him a full dose of female fury:
Allecto blazed with anger: Turnus, speaking,
Was suddenly afraid, so wild her features,
So fierce her flaming eyes, the snakes of the Fury
Hissing disaster. She shoves him back; he falters,
Tries to say more; she plies her whip, she doubles
The rising serpents, and her wild mouth cries,
“See me for what I am, worn down, truth-weary,
Nervous for nothing in the wars of kings!
See what I am, see where I come from, bringing
War, war and death, from the Grim Sisters’ home.”
She flung the firebrand at him, torch and terror
Smoking with lurid light. The body, sweating,
Is torn from sleep…
Next thing we know, he has taken up arms against the king and the realm goes up in flames.
Those senators orchestrating the Kavanaugh nomination might take comfort in Latinus’s initial response:
He is a rock in the sea; he stands like a sea-rock
When a crash of water comes, and it is steadfast
Against the howl of the waves, and the roar is useless,
And the sea-weed, flung at the side, goes dripping back.
That being said, however, eventually he is worn down:
But even so Latinus could not conquer
Their blind determination. Things were going
As Juno willed. He invoked the empty air,
He invoked the gods, in vain. “Alas, we are broken!
We are broken by fate, we are swept away by storm.
You will pay for this, you will pay for it with bloodshed,
O my poor people.
He then shuts himself in his palace and relinquishes the reins of power. Although Aeneas will eventually marry his daughter and rule over the Latins, Italy will “pay for it with bloodshed” first.
Even if the GOP gets Kavanaugh confirmed, will it pay a similar price?
I should make it clear that I don’t think that anger should run our politics. I am for calm deliberation and reasoned compromise. But when you hijack the Supreme Court and then shove through far right justices, you unleash furies.
Further thought: If you find antiquated the idea of Jupiter decreeing that Aeneas will one day rule a great nation, keep in mind that we have a vice president who believes that God has destined him to be president. Apparently this is why pious Mike Pence puts up with his less-than-pious boss.
So could Pence, who is so nervous around women that he makes sure that he is never alone with any woman other than his wife, be our Aeneas? We can expect more of the same if he becomes president. Women frighten only those men who have a one-dimensional view of them.
