[384] Dido will haunt him like a Fury with funeral torches when she is really far away; in other words, the thought of her, angry and revengeful, will ever be present to him. The threat is from Medea in Apoll. R. 4. 385, “ἐκ δέ σε πάτρης Αὐτίκ᾽ ἐμαί σ᾽ ἐλάσειαν Ἐρινύες”. Comp. Id. 3. 703, ἢ σοί γε φίλοις σὺν παισὶ θανοῦσα Ἐίην ἐξ Ἀΐδεω στυγερὴ μετόπισθεν Ἐρινύς. Dido will appear like Clytaemnestra v. 472 below. ‘Ignes’ are firebrands, as in 2. 276., 9. 570. They are murky and smoky, so as to increase the horror. Thus Alecto's torches (7. 456) are “atro lumine fumantes.” For ‘absens’ see above v. 83. According to the Greek belief the living as well as the dead had their Erinnyes, which were in fact curses personified, as Müller remarks in his Dissertations on the Eumenides, so that Virg. has not deviated from mythology in making Dido become a Fury while she is yet alive, at the same time that he agrees with the more modern conception of the absent being made present by recollection. Jahn and Wagn. (smaller ed.) revive the old interpretation, Dido following Aeneas with her funeral flames, which he will see when at sea (comp. v. 661 below, 5. 3 foll.); but this would not suit the present context, as the pile would not be lighted till Dido was dead, while it would represent the thought of death too definitely for Dido's present state of mind. She has talked of death from the first (v. 308); but the notion does not become a resolution till v. 450, and the means are not devised till v. 474.
This text is part of:
John Conington. P. Vergili Maronis opera. P. Vergili Maronis Opera. The works of Virgil, with a Commentary by John Conington, M.A. Late Corpus Professor of Latin in the University of Oxford. London. Whittaker and Co., Ave Maria Lane. 1876.
The National Endowment for the Humanities provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.