1 Death, Power and Narrative Control: Creusa, Dido, and Cleopatra

In the whole of Roman epic poetry, there is no better example of a female character empowered by death than Dido in the Aeneid, and this makes it suitable to begin this chapter by taking a closer look at the themes of agency and subjectivity in the Dido episode, and by discussing how the story relates to other deaths of women in Virgil’s epic. In particular, Dido’s death appears in an interesting light when examined in relation to the death of Creusa, another woman in Aeneas’ life who perishes before the hero’s epic quest ever gets properly started. At first sight, these two deaths appear as different as could be, in terms of agency, power and textual subjectivity. However, as I will try to demonstrate, they are structurally very similar and can be read as complementing each other in Virgil’s epic narrative.

Creusa’s death, which is also the first death of a woman in the Aeneid, takes place in the second book of the epic. It is related in an embedded narrative with Aeneas himself as a secondary narrator: in what becomes the first war episode of the entire poem, the hero describes how Troy fell and he gathered his scattered followers in an attempt to flee.⁵ In Aeneas’ story, when the flight is discussed and debated, Creusa’s narrative presence is strong. The reader cannot forget about Aeneas’ wife, since she is repeatedly mentioned, and the hero’s concern for her safety is made evident. Creusa is even granted a voice of her own: when Aeneas is planning on rushing back to the battle, she steps in to stop him. Aeneas relates that:

Hinc ferro accingor rursus clipeoque sinistram/insertabam aptans meque extra tecta ferebam./ecce autem complexa pedes in limine coniunx/haerebat parvumque patri tendebat Iulum:/‘si periturus abis, et nos rape in omnia tecum;/sin aliquam expertus sumptis spem ponis in armis,/hanc primum tutare domum. cui parvus Iulus,/cui pater et coniunx quondam tua dicta relinquor?’

Verg. Aen. 2.671–678

I gird on this sword again, I pass my left arm through the shield and, fastening it, I leave the house. But look! On the threshold my wife clasps me, clinging to my feet and holding up little Iulus for his father to see. “If you go to your doom, take us, too, to share all with you. But if, judging by your past experience, you place some hope in the armour that you wear, then protect this house first. To what fate do you leave little Iulus, to what fate your father—and me that was once called your wife?”

Creusa’s speech, which clearly reflects the Homeric tradition concerning suffering wives and mothers, foreshadows her fate. coniunx quondam tua dicta implies that her alliance with Aeneas is coming to an end before its time. Moreover, when Aeneas, encouraged by a portent from Jupiter, finally agrees to flee, his plan of action anticipates the future course of the events:

‘ergo age, care pater, cervici imponere nostrae;/ipse subibo umeris, nec me labor iste gravabit./quo res cumque cadent, unum et commune periclum,/una salus ambobus erit. mihi parvus Iulus/sit comes, et longe servet vesitiga coniunx.—tu, genitor, cape sacra manu patriosque Penates—.’—haec fatus latos umeros subiectaque colla/veste super fulvique insternor pelle leonis,/succedoque oneri; dextrae se parvus Iulus/implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis;/pone subit coniunx.

Verg. Aen. 2.707–711, 2.717, 2.721–725

“Come then, dear father, mount on my neck: I myself will bow my shoulders under you, and this task will not be a burden to me. However things may fall, the two of us will meet one and the same danger, or one salvation. Let little Iulus accompany me, and my wife shall follow our steps from a distance.—You, father, take in your arms the sacred objects of our household gods, and those of our homeland—.”—Having spoken thus, I spread a garment of tawny lion’s skin over my broad shoulders and bowed neck, and took on the burden. Little Iulus clasps his hand in mine and follows his father, although his steps are no match for mine. My wife follows behind.

It is apparent that Creusa has already begun to vanish at this point, although she is in fact still present.⁶ She is referred to as following pone and longe, and Aeneas has ceased to call her by her name—she is simply his coniunx, already a somewhat abstract and generic character.⁷ The episode is perhaps the best example of the marginalisation of women in epic, a phenomenon that takes place simultaneously on the narrative and on the ideological levels. As Creusa gradually vanishes from the lines of Virgil’s epic, her significance to its ideology also fades out. As a woman, she has done her duty and secured the patrilineal continuity—now, it becomes more difficult to define what her role in the family and in the epic should be, and it is more convenient to subtly write her off. As Nugent and Oliensis have rightly observed, the iconic tableau of Aeneas’ departure is a physical representation of patrilineal succession where the position of the woman is marginal.⁸ What pius Aeneas values is what he keeps close—the father (who signifies his respect for past generations), the son (who symbolises his hope for the continuance of the family) and the household gods (who protect his founding mission). The family, the gods, and the patria—all the classical components of the Virgilian pietas—can be perceived in this tableau. It is all too obvious that the wife and coniugal love are not among them.

Considering Creusa’s gradual marginalisation in this embedded narrative, and the way in which the narrator foreshadows her fate, it does not come as a surprise when she eventually goes missing in the chaos and confusion of the war. When Aeneas realises that Creusa is no longer with him, he depicts himself as going mad with worry:

quem non incusavi amens hominumque deorumque/aut quid in eversa vidi crudelius urbe?/Ascanium Anchisenque patrem Teucrosque penates/commendo sociis et curva valle recondo;/ipse urbem repeto et cingor fulgentibus armis./stat casus renovare omnis omnemque reverti/per Troiam et rursus caput obiectare periclis.—ausus quin etiam voces iactare per umbram/implevi clamore vias, maestusque Creusam/nequiquam ingeminans iterumque iterumque vocavi.

Verg. Aen. 2.745–751, 2.768–770

What man or god did I not accuse, out of my mind with frenzy, what crueller fate did I see in the destroyed city? I entrusted Ascanius, my father Anchises, and the household gods of Troy to my comrades and hid them in a bendy valley. I myself headed back for the city, and girded on my shiny arms. I stood to renew every disaster, to trace my way back through all Troy, and to again expose my life to dangers.—I even dared to cry out loud into the shadows; I filled the streets with shouts and, sadly and in vain, repeatedly called for Creusa, again and again.

Now he leaves behind his father, his son, and his household gods and is suddenly awakened to the realisation that he even has a wife. As if to excuse his neglect of her, Aeneas exaggerates his anxiety at her disappearance. It is crucial to note that it is Aeneas whose voice we hear and whose viewpoint is delivered to the reader; likewise, it is Aeneas who is the victim in this passage—not Creusa, whose whereabouts and condition remain a mystery. Arguably, this is a behavioural pattern very typical of Virgil’s hero: after causing some irreversible misfortune by being immemor, he acts heartbroken, denies all responsibility and stresses his own suffering. One finds him repeating this pattern on numerous occasions later on: his desertion of Dido is the best example, and the death of Pallas in book ten is another.⁹ Ironically for a hero who is destined to move ever onward on his epic mission, Aeneas seems obsessed with the past. He repeatedly strives to go backwards, to absolve himself of the guilt that he feels over something that happened before, and to change the past rather than the future.¹⁰

And time after time, this is denied to him. His desperate attempt to rewrite Creusa’s fate is futile: this becomes clear to him when her ghost appears. Aeneas relates that while he was looking for his wife in mad frenzy, her umbra suddenly appeared to him, nota maior imago, and dispelled his cares with comforting words:

tum sic adfari et curas his demere dictis:/‘quid tantum insano iuvat indulgere dolori,/o dulcis coniunx? non haec sine numine divum/eveniunt; nec te comitem hinc portare Creusam/fas aut ille sinit superi regnator Olympi.—lacrimas dilectae pelle Creusae./non ego Myrmidonum sedes Dolopumve superbas/aspiciam aut Grais servitum matribus ibo,/Dardanis et divae Veneris nurus …/sed me magna deum genetrix his detinet oris./iamque vale et nati serva communis amorem.’

Verg. Aen. 2.775–779, 2.784–789

Then she spoke to me thus, expelling my concerns with these words: “What does it help to indulge like that in senseless grief, O dear husband? This does not happen against the will of the gods; it is not the divine destiny that you should take Creusa from here as your partner, and the ruler of high Olympus does not allow it.—Expel your tears for your beloved Creusa. I will never see the mighty homes of the Myrmidons or Dolopians, or go to be the slave of Greek matrons—I, a Trojan woman and daughter-in-law of goddess Venus … but the great mother of the gods keeps me on these shores. And now goodbye, and cherish your love for our common child.”

Apparently, Creusa is now deceased and has found peace, although neither the internal nor the external audience will ever find out how she actually met her end. However, what seems noteworthy is that after her passing, Creusa finds her voice again (if only as a phantom whipped up by Aeneas’ guilty conscious). She explains her death to be the will of Jupiter himself, and makes clear that she herself is content with her fate. Moreover, in her own words Creusa absolves Aeneas of guilt and responsibility and sends him on his way, to pursue a new dynastic marriage in a new homeland. In a way, her speech appears to represent her passing as a sacrificial death, in the manner of Iphigenia’s, that ensures the continuance of the hero’s epic mission.

Unsurprisingly, the Creusa episode has often been examined as a prime example of the epic tendency to erase female characters from the narrative whenever they appear to hinder the male heroic mission.¹¹ Submitting to the male ideology of the poem, Creusa actually writes herself off the story, thus committing a ‘narrative suicide’ in order to serve the needs of the patriarchal, patrilineal community, and to support the male hero’s search for a new identity. It is, however, crucial to notice that exactly for this reason, Creusa’s speech wields considerable narrative power. It has to be from her lips that Aeneas is set free: she needs to be given a voice here, for she is the only one who can stop the hero from wandering around in agony and set him on his course. The teleological drive of the epic depends on Creusa’s ability to convince her addressee, and at this, she is successful.

After Aeneas has been convinced, there is no longer anything to keep Creusa in the story. Immediately after her speech, Aeneas leaves Troy, leaving behind the wife who symbolises the falling city, and—in the larger scale of things—his past and his Trojan-ness.¹² He is now a refugee in search of a new home, a new fate and a new wife.¹³ Whereas the disintegration of his Trojan identity is thus assured, it is significant that Creusa, too, as an embodiment of this identity, vanishes from the narrative immediately after her speech. After Aeneid 2, her name never comes up again, apart from a single mention in book nine, when Ascanius vows to take Euryalus’ mother as his surrogate mother, “lacking only the name of Creusa” (nomenque Creusae/solum defuerit).¹⁴ By means of this final reference, Creusa’s place is filled by another even in the life of her son. This complete disappearance strengthens the idea that Creusa is symbolic of a time and place that the Aeneadae must leave behind in order to carry on.

Scholars who read the Creusa episode as a violent erasure of a woman in favour of the hero’s epic mission have often emphasised the similarities between Creusa and Dido in this respect. According to Perkell, both episodes deal with Aeneas’ abandonment of a woman he claims to love. Likewise, in both cases, this abandonment is due to the hero’s praised pietas and, finally, in both stories, it eventually leads to the woman’s death. Perkell argues that it is as if the women that Aeneas loves exist only to be removed from the story; she considers the pattern to be a part of Virgil’s attempt to represent the emotional cost of becoming an imperial people.¹⁵

As I see it, the deaths of Creusa and Dido indeed complement each other in the structure of Virgil’s epic, but this does not mean that their narrative and ideological purposes would be the same. Instead, I suggest that Dido’s death in book four works as a deliberate antithesis to Creusa’s passing—or, in fact, to Aeneas’ version of it. We should note that the story of Creusa’s disappearance, as we learn it, is told by Aeneas himself, and its primary internal audience is none other than Dido. Whether she believes Aeneas’ story or not, remains a mystery—as de Jong observes, these kinds of long external analepses told by secondary narrators are practically unfalsifiable for the narratees.¹⁶ In Aeneas’ case, however, the external audience might be tempted to doubt the verifiability of his story: Creusa’s speech, in particular, so conveniently demolishes the hero’s every concern, that it could be argued to be an outstanding example of Aeneas’ habit of rewriting his painful past. It is not that Aeneas would deliberately lie to Dido; it is more likely that he is trying to convince himself, in order to be able to live with his past and to move on with his future. In any case, the fact that Dido is the primary narratee of Aeneas’ story about Creusa’s death is the crucial link between the two women, and, I suggest, Dido’s judgment of the tale can be observed as having an impact on her later actions and decisions.

Unlike Creusa, who erases herself from the narrative in favour of Aeneas’ epic mission, Dido makes sure that her death will ensure her continuous presence in Aeneas’ future. Most readings of Aeneid 4 have examined Dido’s behaviour after Aeneas has left her as frantic, impulsive and out-of-control;¹⁷ however, the way she elaborately plans her suicide down to the last detail, and how she deceitfully manages to hide her plans from everyone, create a different impression of the queen’s state of mind. This is not the behaviour of a mad woman—or if it is, it is not the madness of the maenadic and ecstatic kind that Dido manifests earlier in book four. After pondering every possible route open to her and deciding on death,¹⁸ Dido conducts the last moments of her life as if it is a magnificent show. Her death is not forced upon her, nor is it an impulsive act of agony; rather, it is a carefully designed and executed performance, targeted at making a lasting impression. Altogether, Dido’s determinacy and power in designing her own death are remarkable and without comparison in the epic tradition.

In Dido’s preparation for her death, one can perceive how different her fate actually is from the fates of the sacrificial women of Roman legendary history, and how different it is from that of Creusa. The women loved by Aeneas may both be destined to die; however, Dido’s determinacy to die on her own terms marks her as drastically different from Creusa. Furthermore, while Creusa’s death is hidden from the eyes of both Aeneas and his audience, Dido’s death is elaborately depicted down to every last detail—this visual feast considerably increases the memorability of the act. It is also crucial to note that, by the end of book four, the power dynamics of the story have considerably shifted. When discussing Aeneid 2, where Aeneas relates the story about the fall of Troy, Syed rightly points out his powerful position compared to the other characters of the poem: Aeneas’ role as an internal secondary narrator gives him the power to shape and control the story in a way others cannot.¹⁹ Arguably, these dynamics are reversed at the end of book four. Aeneas’ power over the narrative is limited to his own part in the story: he can choose to leave Carthage, but beyond that, he is not in control of the events, as Dido’s suicide demonstrates. It is remarkable that Aeneas in fact turns form a narrator into a narratee: later, in book six, he mentions that the news of Dido’s death was told to him (mihi nuntius—venerat). Thus, Aeneas’ control over the narrative, established in the beginning of his and Dido’s love story, is taken away from him at the end of it.

Aeneas’ hasty flight from Carthage makes evident his lack of control over the events. Much as with the fall of Troy, the hero leaves the stage in the dead of night—this time, because he does not know what Dido might be planning and is terrified by it.²⁰ While Aeneas’ departure is an integral part of both Creusa’s and Dido’s death episodes, the manner of his leaving could not be more different in these two tales. From Troy, the hero flees with Creusa’s blessings, but from Carthage, he sails away with Dido’s curse upon him. The structural positioning of these episodes at the beginning and at the end of Dido and Aeneas’ love story strengthens the idea that they are meant to be read in the light of each other, as two very different articulations of the same theme. While Creusa’s death validates and justifies Aeneas’ imperial mission, Dido’s death challenges and opposes it on both narrative and ideological levels.

Dido’s attempt to secure her presence in the narrative and in Aeneas’ future turns out to be successful. With her final curse, she evokes undying hostility between her own and Aeneas’ descendants and makes her Punic people a crucial factor in the identity of future Romans. Moreover, on a more personal level, Aeneas never seems to be able to completely escape the memory of Dido, as he himself anticipates when he swears that “nor will I ever regret remembering Elissa, as long as I can remember anything, as long as my spirit rules my body” (nec me meminisse pigebit Elissae,/dum memor ipse mei, dum spiritus hos regit artus).²¹ The latter part of the Aeneid shows these words to be quite true, since time after time, various allusions and references remind the reader of Dido: the best example is the death of Pallas in book ten, when the bitterly mourning Aeneas is depicted as wrapping the body in a fabric woven by the queen.²² Thus, whereas Creusa vanishes, Dido’s narrative presence remains strong despite (and because of) her death: it is the way she designed it, perhaps inspired by the pitiable fate of Aeneas’ first wife.

The differences and the similarities between the Creusa episode and Dido’s story can be very clearly observed in book six, where Aeneas’ obsessive need to control the memory of the past becomes evident again. In his visit to the underworld, he suddenly has a vision of Dido’s ghost and tries to address her, in order to explain ‘what really happened’ between them. Shedding tears, he speaks to her:

infelix Dido, verus mihi nuntius ergo/venerat exstinctam, ferroque extrema secutam?/funeris heu! tibi causa fui? per sidera iuro,/per superos, et si qua fides tellure sub ima est,/invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi./sed me iussa deum, quae nunc has ire per umbras,/per loca senta situ cogunt noctemque profundam,/imperiis egere suis; nec credere quivi/hunc tantum tibi me discessu ferre dolorem./siste gradum teque aspectu ne subtrahe nostro./quem fugis? extremum fato, quod te adloquor, hoc est.

Verg. Aen. 6.456–466

Poor Dido—it was true then, the news I received, saying you were dead and had sought your end by the sword? Alas! Was I the cause of your death? I swear by the stars, by the gods, and by whatever good faith there may be in the underworld: it was against my will that I left from your shores, O queen. But the gods’ commands, which now make me pass through these shadows, through rugged and forsaken places and the deep night, compelled me with their orders. And I could not believe that my departure could bring you such agony. Halt your steps and do not withdraw from my view. Whom do you run from? By the decree of fate, these are the last words that I will ever speak to you.

Aeneas, however, seems to forget that Dido has heard his excuses before—she was the primary narratee when Aeneas explained away his responsibility for Creusa’s death. It is therefore no surprise that she refuses to engage with Aeneas, and is completely indifferent towards his version of the story. We read that

illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat/nec magis incepto vultum sermone movetur,/quam si dura silex aut stet Marpesia cautes./tandem corripuit sese atque inimica refugit/in nemus umbriferum, coniunx ubi pristinus illi/respondet curis aequatque Sychaeus amorem./nec minus Aeneas, casu percussus iniquo,/prosequitur lacrimis longe et miseratur euntem.

Verg. Aen. 6.469–476

She, turning away, kept her eyes fixed on the ground and as he spoke, her face was as immovable as if she was made of hard stone or Marpesian rock. Finally, she snatched herself away and, hostile, fled back to the shady grove, where her former husband Sychaeus attends to her troubles and returns her love. Aeneas, nonetheless, struck by her unfair doom, follows her with teary eyes from a distance, and pities her as she goes.

As von Albrecht and Skinner have pointed out, the episode is an obvious reversal of the episode in book four where Dido pleads to Aeneas, trying to stop him from leaving her.²³ More importantly, I would add, it is a rewriting of Creusa’s death and disappearance. Now it is Aeneas who follows from a distance (prosequitur longe), who tries to cling on to Dido and to keep her from fading out. Like Dido and Creusa before him, Aeneas now has to experience the impossibility of keeping someone around who simply does not care enough to stay.

Dido’s refusal to speak is a particularly intriguing element in the episode, since it demonstrates that, while having a voice is a crucial part of epic subjectivity, sometimes holding one’s tongue can be a more powerful narrative act. Dido’s silence grants her just as much power as Creusa’s speech did to her. In a very subtle way, the poet brings to discussion the artificial nature of memory and the battle over its control, themes crucial to the Augustan period. Virgil’s way of dealing with female deaths in his epic is a fitting reminder that the one who controls the past controls the future. Moreover, as Dido’s silence shows, the control over that past is not only in the hands of the one telling the story, but also in the hands of the audience who choose how (or if) to receive it.

Dido’s chilly reaction to Aeneas’ pleas demonstrates her control over her fate: even in death, she does not allow Aeneas to do to her what he did to Creusa; that is, to turn her into a mere memory, and into a hallmark of his imperial establishment. She refuses to absolve the hero of his guilt, and by so doing, makes sure that he will not be set free from her memory. Instead, Dido and Carthage become defining characteristics in Aeneas’ self-fashioning—and, moreover, in that of his Roman descendants. Through a pivotal female death, the fates and the identities of Rome and its great enemy are irrevocably entwined. Dido’s suicide makes sure that the past will continue to determine the future, just as Dido will continue to determine Aeneas, and Carthage Rome.

Therefore, the deaths of Dido and Creusa, while structurally parallel, demonstrate the two very different ways of constructing literary subjectivity for women in Roman war epic. Whereas Creusa is removed from the narrative and deprived of her significance in the poem, Dido, by exiting the epic in the manner of her own choosing, remains in the story until the very end. Furthermore, by claiming power over her own death, she ends up as a permanent factor in Aeneas’ identity, and in the collective identity of his successors. Because of these crucial differences, I would suggest that instead of Creusa, Dido’s most significant alter ego, and the model whose death her suicide mimics is, once again, Cleopatra. Virgil fashions Dido’s death in such a manner that the Egyptian queen can be constantly perceived in the background, and this resemblance adds both authority and threat to the power that the queen wields over her own demise.

Since a spectacular death is what both Dido and Cleopatra were most famous for in Augustan Rome, it does not come as a surprise that the foreshadowing of doom is one of the most obvious and notable intratextual devices through which the two queens are associated with each other in the Aeneid.²⁴ Throughout her story, Dido is described as infelix and moritura—both expressions that in Virgil’s vocabulary unmistakably mark the forthcoming doom of a dangerous dux femina.²⁵ Besides these attributes, she is also depicted as moriens and certa mori.²⁶ As for Cleopatra, the only time she is directly mentioned in the Aeneid, the narrator makes sure to stress her approaching death: when Cleopatra is depicted as commander at the battle of Actium, we read that “the queen in the middle summons her troops with her native rattle, and does not yet notice the twin snakes behind her” (regina in mediis patrio vocat agmina sistro,/necdum etiam geminos a tergo respicit anguis).²⁷ In this episode, the connection between the two queens is made explicit by the rhetoric of death: Cleopatra at Actium is described as pallentem morte futura, while Dido in book four is pallida morte futura.²⁸ The deaths of both Dido and Cleopatra, therefore, are consistently depicted as both inevitable and predestined, required by the teleological narrative of epic as well as by its patriotic ideology. Yet, inevitable as these deaths may be, it is equally noteworthy that what connects the two queens is that they themselves actively choose and control the manner of their passing.

Of course, when discussing Cleopatra’s death in this context, it is the literary tradition concerning the case that is under examination, not the historical event itself. By as early as the Augustan period, the queen’s suicide had become a legend of mythical dimensions, and the strong partiality of all the surviving literary sources makes it impossible to accurately trace the events behind the myth.²⁹ The sources that relate the story are marked by admiration, contempt, and fear of the queen, and a strong orientalist tendency is present throughout. Unsurprisingly, it seems that the Absolute Other is at her most fascinating when accompanied by the exciting presence of death. Perhaps the most famous example of the literary commemoration of the event is Horace’s ode 1.37, where these ambiguous feelings are elaborately expressed:

Quae generosius/perire quaerens nec muliebriter/expavit ensem nec latentis/classe cita reparavit oras;/ausa et iacentem visere regiam/vultu sereno, fortis et asperas/tractare serpentis, ut atrum/corpore combiberet venenum,/deliberata morte ferocior,/saevis Liburnis scilicet invidens/privata deduci superbo/non humilis mulier triumpho.³⁰

Hor. Carm. 1.37.21–32

Determined to die more nobly, she showed no womanly fear of the sword, nor did she use her swift fleet to gain some hidden shore. She had the strength of mind to gaze on her ruined palace with a calm countenance, and the courage to handle the sharp-toothed serpents, letting her body drink in their black venom. Once she had resolved to die she was all the more defiant—determined, no doubt, to cheat the cruel Liburnians; she would not be stripped of her royalty and conveyed to face a jeering triumph: no humble woman she.³¹

Horace’s depiction demonstrates the significance of Cleopatra’s death for the Augustan mythmaking tradition in the early imperial period. Doubtless, the queen’s death was the final matter that assured her immortality and her renown as the strangest, most fascinating enemy that Rome ever had. This is the literary tradition against which one should understand and examine the formation of the archetype of a regina moritura in Roman war epic of the early Principate.

In the Carmen de bello Actiaco, a fragmentary epic poem from the 60s CE,³² we find a rare and detailed epic depiction of Cleopatra’s preparation for death. The queen’s tragic end apparently played a considerable part in this poem; however, the fragments that survive do not include the actual death scene, only an episode where she tests different ways of dying, using slaves and criminals as her guinea-pigs:

[Dele]ctumqu[e loc]um quo noxia turba co[i]ret/praeberetque suae spectacula tri[s]tia mortis./Qualis ad instantis acies cum tela parantur,/signa tubae classesque simul terrestibus armis,/est facies ea visa loci, cum saeva coirent/instrumenta necis, v[a]rio congesta paratu:/und[i]que sic illuc campo deforme co[a]c[t]um/omne vagabatur leti genus, omne timoris.—[Hic i]acet [absumptus f]erro, tu[m]et [il]le ven[eno]/aut pendent [cav]is cervicibus aspide mollem/labitur in somnum trahiturque libidine mortis:/percutit [ad]flatu brevis hunc sine morsibus anguis,/volnere seu t[e]nui pars inlita parva veneni/ocius interem[i]t, laqueis pars cogitur artis/in[t]ersaeptam animam pressis effundere venis,/i[n]mersisque f[r]eto clauserunt guttura fauces./[H]as inter strages solio descendit et inter—.

Col. 5–6

And the chosen place where the guilty mob might assemble and offer grim spectacles of their own deaths. just as when weapons are being prepared for oncoming battles, standards, trumpets, and fleets, along with land arms, so seemed the appearance of the place, when the cruel instruments of death assembled, brought together with varied preparation: gathered there on the field from every place in this way, every foul kind of death was wandering, every kind of fear.—This one lies cut off by the sword, that one is swollen with poison or, with the asp hanging on his hollow neck, drifts into soft sleep and is led on by the desire for death: this one a small snake kills with its breath without a bite, or a small amount of poison, smeared in a slight wound, kills more quickly, some are compelled by tightened nooses to pour forth their blocked breath from compressed passageways, and the throats of those plunged in water closed the openings. In the midst of this slaughter she descended from her throne and among …³³

This episode—most likely the model and inspiration for Plutarch and Cassius Dio later on—shows Cleopatra walking amongst the death and the dying, calmly calculating the best possible way to go.³⁴ As Keith puts it, the queen is “both the director and the audience of the spectacular theatre of death”.³⁵ And this is merely a rehearsal for her performance in the leading role.

The way in which Cleopatra plans her passing in the Carmen de bello Actiaco instantly recalls Dido in the Aeneid. Admittedly, Dido only ponders possible alternatives to death, not the manner of death itself. However, in their determinacy and elaboration, the two epic queens strikingly resemble each other. They plan their suicides down to every detail, not only to make it an easy passing, but primarily to make it a spectacular one. In short, they want to attain control of their life and renown.

Keith argues that the death of Cleopatra in the Carmen de bello Actiaco “constructs and confirms distinctions between Roman and foreigner, conqueror and conquered, living and dead, male and female”.³⁶ As I see it, the situation is actually the opposite of this: Cleopatra, although perhaps forced to leave the stage, actively denies the conqueror an opportunity to determine her fate—thus, she confuses and questions the power dynamics between the two. Rather than confirming, her actions blur the distinction between object and agent, for she is not only acted upon, but claims a role as the ultimate decision-maker over her own death. Moreover, Cleopatra is the unquestionable focaliser of the episode, as the reader gazes upon the dying people through her eyes, focusing on what she considers important: the manner and efficiency of each form of death, on how quick or how gory it is. I would argue that the epic Cleopatra, by submitting herself to a death of her own choosing, actually gains considerable textual subjectivity: the reader is invited to feel what she feels, to imagine himself in the position of those who are dying, as she does.

In this way, the literary topos where a woman’s death manifests and showcases male power over her body, is undermined, and instead, Roman war epic presents a female subjectivity that is rather unparalleled in the ancient literary tradition. The situation is similar to that of Dido, who pierces herself with the ensis Dardanius. The sword is a phallic symbol of Aeneas’ power to penetrate and kill, a power essentially associated with manhood in the universe of epic. Nevertheless, when Dido’s own hand plunges it in her breast, she robs Aeneas of this power and changes from a female locus of male action into someone who is simultaneously an object and a subject—and definitely an empowered agent.³⁷ What perfects Dido’s revenge, is that this act simultaneously both disempowers Aeneas and places upon him the responsibility for the queen’s death. Compared to the mythical tales of sacrificed virgins or to the raped and killed women of the Roman legendary past, it is clear to the reader that this is a completely different story. Instead of a male, mobile hero of epic striving for action ‘over her dead body’, one finds a female subject who objectifies herself and thereby ends up undermining (and eternally defining) the male hero.

This message is strengthened by Dido’s dying speech, in which she manages to claim credit for her suicide while simultaneously blaming Aeneas for it. The queen’s last words clearly represent her as the sovereign of her own life and death:

‘dulces exuviae, dum fata deusque sinebat,/accipite hanc animam meque his exsolvite curis./vixi et, quem dederat cursum Fortuna, peregi,/et nunc magna mei sub terras ibit imago./urbem praeclaram statui, mea moenia vidi,/ulta virum poenas inimico a fratre recepi,/felix, heu! nimium felix, si litora tantum/numquam Dardaniae tetigissent nostra carinae!’/dixit et os impressa toro, ‘moriemur inultae,/sed moriamur’, ait. ‘sic, sic iuvat ire sub umbras./hauriat hunc oculis ignem crudelis ab alto/Dardanus et nostrae secum ferat omina mortis.’/Dixerat, atque illam media inter talia ferro/conlapsam aspiciunt comites, ensemque cruore/spumantem sparsasque manus.

Verg. Aen. 4.651–665

“O spoils of my struggle, sweet to me while fate and the god allowed it, accept this life of mine and release me from these troubles! I have lived my life, and I have finished the course that Fortune had given; and now my mighty ghost shall go beneath the earth. I made a famous city rise; I have seen my walls; avenging my husband, I punished my hostile brother—happy, oh! too happy I would have been, if only the Dardan ships had never touched our shores!” She spoke and, pressing her face against the couch, said: “I will die unavenged, but let me die! Thus, thus I am happy to go under the shades. May the cruel Trojan’s eyes drink in this fire in the skies, and carry with him the omens of my death.” She spoke, and in the midst of these words, her attendants see her fallen on the sword, the blade foaming with blood and her hands spattered.

The especially striking point is that the same speech could, with moderate alterations, be attributed to Cleopatra. Dido recalls her accomplishments as a queen and proclaims that, had she been allowed to rule in peace, without ever meeting the Trojan exiles, both her own fate and that of her people would have been happier. It is easy for the reader to recall Cleopatra. In effect, Lucan’s statement Hoc animi nox illa dedit, quae prima cubili/miscuit incestam ducibus Ptolemaida nostris seems like a deliberate reference to Dido’s last words. It demonstrates how the two queens continue to be connected and associated in the intertextual tradition of Roman epic, and perhaps it implies something about how the Roman audience might have read Virgil’s Dido with Cleopatra in mind—and Lucan’s Cleopatra with Dido in mind.³⁸

But although they are empowered, it cannot be denied that both Dido and Cleopatra are certainly objects of gaze at the moment of their passing—and not a neutral gaze but, as pointed out above, an otherising, voyeuristic gaze that drinks in the scandalous and eroticised aspects of their deaths.³⁹ However, it is also crucial to notice that while the queens clearly are objectified by onlookers and by the gaze of the reader, they do wield a narrative power quite exceptional to women, in directing that gaze. When Virgil’s Dido controls the time, the place and the manner of her suicide, she—like Cleopatra in the Carmen de bello Actiaco—becomes the director of her death; and just like the omnipotent gaze of a movie director, she decides where the camera travels, what it leaves out and what the audience will gaze upon.⁴⁰ The male gaze that strongly marks the deaths of Iphigenia, Polyxena, Lucretia and Verginia is, in Dido’s death, controlled by the queen herself. This is made evident in the first lines of book five, which opens with the Trojans’ departure from Carthage:

Interea medium Aeneas iam classe tenebat/certus iter fluctusque atros Aquilone secabat,/moenia respiciens, quae iam infelicis Elissae/conlucent flammis. quae tantum accenderit ignem/causa latet; duri magno sed amore dolores/polluto notumque, furens quid femina possit,/triste per augurium Teucrorum pectora ducunt.

Verg. Aen. 5.1–7

Meanwhile, Aeneas with his fleet was now holding steadily his course on the open sea and splitting the black waves stirred up by the north wind. He looks back on the city walls that are now lit up with poor Elissa’s flames. What cause kindled such a fire, they do not know; but the awareness of the harsh pains when great love is defiled, and that of which a furious woman is capable, put sad forebodings in the hearts of the Trojans.

Dido’s power over the gaze becomes obvious when one compares this episode with Aeneid 4.661–662. Aeneas sees exactly what Dido wants him to see, what she has carefully prepared as a feast for his guilty eyes.⁴¹ Thus, the role of the gaze in this episode strengthens the message delivered by Dido’s speech: besides claiming the control over her own death, Dido claims control over the narrative, temporarily stripping Aeneas of it and subverting the power dynamics of the poem.

The functional role of Dido’s subjectivity in Virgil’s epic can be illuminated by examining her role as the Absolute Other to the projected Roman reader. As I noted before, being a woman, a foreigner and a monarch, Dido embodies the ‘difference’: that is, the threatening and animalistic death and sex drives that distinguish her from ‘the Roman self’. However, what constantly hints at the underlying same-ness between the self and the other is the fear, evident in all orientalist discourses, that if let too close, the other might end up corrupting the subject and turning him into her image. This phenomenon can be clearly observed in Dido’s story. When Mercury intervenes in Aeneid 4 to remind Aeneas of his mission, the hero is already going through a transition to become a Carthaginian. He is depicted as supervising the building of Dido’s city, and his attire is strikingly foreign: “his sword was twinkling with tawny jasper, and a cloak falling down his shoulders blazed with Tyrian purple” (illi stellatus iaspide fulva/ensis erat, Tyrioque ardebat murice laena/demissa ex umeris).⁴² In effect, it appears that the very reason why Mercury needs to intervene is because otherwise, Aeneas would stop pursuing the new (Italian) identity, and happily adopt Dido’s. Shockingly enough, the reader is made to realise that Aeneas’ future Latin-ness is not an essential part of him, any more than his old Trojan-ness is. Under different circumstances, he could have turned into a Carthaginian, and Rome would never have seen the light of day. In fact, the epic hero and the Absolute Other seem to have more in common than the reader would like to admit.

Naturally, this aspect of Dido’s story strongly recalls Cleopatra. As I pointed out in chapter two, Aeneas’ eagerness to build Dido’s city instead of looking for his own reminds the reader of the accusations against Mark Antony during the civil war. According to later accounts by Appian and Dio, Antony, bewitched by Cleopatra, was prioritising Egypt’s benefit at Rome’s expense. According to Appian, he was “swiftly transformed”, and “this passion was the beginning and the end of his evils”.⁴³ Dio, for his part, calls Antony “entirely demoralised”, and states that

καὶ τό τε στρατήγιον βασίλειον ὠνόμαζε, καὶ ἀκινάκην ἔστιν ὅτε παρεζώννυτο, ἐσθῆτί τε ἔξω τῶν πατρίων ἐχρῆτο, καὶ ἐπὶ κλίνης ἐπιχρύσου δίφρου τε ὁμοίου καὶ ἐν τῷ κοινῷ ἑωρᾶτο. συνεγράφετό τε αὐτῇ καὶ συνεπλάττετο, αὐτὸς μὲν Ὄσιρις καὶ Διόνυσος ἐκείνη δὲ Σελήνη τε καὶ Ἶσις λέγοντες εἶναι. ἐξ οὗπερ καὶ τὰ μάλιστα ἔκφρων ὑπ᾽ αὐτῆς ἐκ μαγγανείας τινὸς γεγονέναι ἔδοξεν. οὐ γὰρ ὅτι ἐκεῖνον ἀλλὰ καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους τούς τι παρ᾽ αὐτῷ δυναμένους οὕτω καὶ ἐγοήτευσε καὶ κατέδησεν ὥστ᾽—.

[h]e also termed his headquarters “the palace,” sometimes wore an oriental dagger at his belt, dressed in a manner not in accordance with the customs of his native land, and let himself be seen even in public upon a gilded couch or a chair of that kind. He posed with her for portrait paintings and statues, he representing Osiris or Dionysus and she Selene or Isis. This more than all else made him seem to have been bewitched by her through some enchantment. For she so charmed and enthralled not only him but also the rest who had any influence with him—.⁴⁴

It is significant that Antony’s ‘transformation’ and betrayal were not merely a matter of politics, but that their cultural aspects were under scrutiny, as well.⁴⁵ The fading of his Roman identity in the hands of a foreign queen was used against Antony, because it reinforced the image of him as a man corrupted by oriental vices—in contrast to Octavian’s true Romanitas. The imperial historians’ depictions of Antony’s effeminate appearance and of his fondness of foreign customs are one expression of this topos.⁴⁶ Another can be found in Lucan’s depiction of Caesar, indulging in Cleopatra’s lavish party, amazed by the wealth and wonders of Egypt—in the Pharsalia, Caesar anticipates Antony as a Roman who gives up his Romanitas in exchange for the luxury and pleasures offered by the Orient.⁴⁷

Thus, from a Roman viewpoint, Dido’s Punic-ness (like Creusa’s Trojan-ness) is a problem that causes a threat to Aeneas’ self-fashioning and endangers the future emergence of Romanitas. Deep down, the reader knows that the foreign queen is not an Absolute Other, but an abject other: because the interaction with her poses a constant danger of ‘becoming the other’, she must be erased and removed from the narrative. As Keith has put it, just as Aeneas inaugurates his mission through the death of Creusa and confirms it through that of Dido, so too Augustus restores order through the death of Cleopatra.⁴⁸ None of these women can become part of the future that is supposed to be built on Italian identity. However, what constitutes the irony is that by leaving Dido, Aeneas offers her the means to establish her position as a constant part of Roman history and as an integral factor in the identity of the Roman people. The foreign queen, therefore, becomes a factor that determines the essence of Roman-ness, but on her own terms, and this destabilises the power balance between the two. By giving Dido power over her own story, the poet demonstrates the impossibility of any community, or individual, to attain full control over the formation of its identity. The process is a two-way street, where those who are ostensibly defined as different are actually continuously shaped by each other. In other words, the self is formed in a dynamic interaction with the other.

Just as in the case of Statius’ Jocasta (discussed in chapter six), here too it is as important to pay attention to the story that is not told as it is to analyse the one that is told. In an alternative tradition concerning Dido’s death (related by Pompeius Trogus), the queen of Carthage kills herself on a sacrificial pyre in order to escape marriage to the African king Iarbas, and to honor her vows of chastity.⁴⁹ In Trogus’ version of the story, Aeneas does not appear at all, and Dido’s self-sacrifice is depicted as a heroic and patriotic act that epitomises the ideal of chaste female behaviour.⁵⁰ In the light of this version, it seems very significant that Virgil chooses a different route, making the queen a vengeful lover rather than a loyal univira. It would be easy to argue that he does so merely for the sake of drama and romance, or to downplay Dido’s moral standing; however, I suggest that there is a more profound meaning to be found. It is crucial to notice that Virgil’s version more fittingly connects Dido’s fate with the theme of Roman identity—it makes her the literary alter ego of, and a model for, the Augustan Cleopatra, the enemy whose impact on Roman identity is eternal. By comparing the deaths of the two queens, the poet depicts both the Punic Wars and the civil wars as pivotal events that continue to shape ‘the Roman self’.⁵¹ Accordingly, Dido’s story is a prime example that demonstrates how far the death of a woman can reach in Roman war epic, and how far back in myth and history the components of Roman identity may go.

2 Getting Rid of the Queen: The Archetype of regina moritura

The deaths of Dido and Creusa, therefore, represent two different ways of erasing the woman from the epic narrative—one that constructs textual subjectivity for the female character, and the other that marginalises her. Both, however, are deaths that wield considerable narrative power, as they shape the epic plot and drive the story forward. In addition to these two ways of dealing with a death of a woman, one other recurrent narrative pattern can be found in the tradition of Roman war epic that is of importance to the ideological content of the poems. This storyline relates a suicidal death of the elderly queen of a falling city, and it is narrated both by Virgil in the Aeneid and by Statius in the Thebaid.

There are many obvious similarities in these two episodes, and they aptly manifest the intertextual circulation of themes and topoi within the epic tradition, as well as its tendency to draw influences from other Graeco-Roman literary genres. Virgil appears to have utilised Euripides’ and Sophocles’ versions of Jocasta’s death, as well as Euripides’ Phaedra, as models for Amata’s suicide—Statius, besides alluding to these same models, strongly leans on Virgil’s Amata in his portrayal of the Theban queen.⁵² As a result, the deaths of these two women form an epic archetype of their own: an archetype that is strongly built on the Athenian tragedy’s narrative tradition concerning the suicidal death of an elderly woman with well-known sexual transgressions.

In the Aeneid, Amata’s death takes place in book twelve, a few hundred lines before the end of the poem. It comes as no surprise to the reader: earlier, the queen had explicitly stated that she would be unable to live on, should Turnus perish in battle.⁵³ In effect, Amata’s decision to finally take her own life is partly due to her conviction that Turnus has already fallen:

regina ut tectis venientem proscipit hostem,/incessi muros, ignis ad tecta volare,/nusquam acies contra Rutulos, nulla agmina Turni,/infelix pugnae iuvenem in certamine credit/exstinctum et subito mentem turbata dolore/se causam clamat crinemque caputque malorum,/multaque per maestum demens effata furorem/purpureos moritura manu discindit amictus/et nodum informis leti trabe nectit ab alta./quam cladem miserae postquam accepere Latinae,/filia prima manu flavos Lavinia crinis/et roseas laniata genas, tum cetera circum/turba furit, resonant late plangoribus aedes.

Verg. Aen. 12.595–607

—as soon as the queen, from her palace, sees the enemy coming, the walls under attack, and flames flying up towards the roofs, but nowhere Rutulian armies or any of Turnus’ troops to stand against them, the poor woman believes that Turnus has been killed in battle. Her mind distraught by sudden grief, she cries that she is the cause, the source and the spring of the evils. Having spoken a great deal of frenzied words, out of her mind with grief, she then, intent on dying, tears her purple robes, and from a high beam ties a noose of an inglorious death. And after the unhappy Latin women found out about this disaster, her daughter Lavinia first tears her golden hair and her rosy cheeks with her hand, then all the crowd around her starts raging; the great palace halls ring with wailings.

Amata’s death scene complements her previous appearances in the poem, and completes the picture of a frantic woman out of reach of symbolic logic and a slave to her bodily drives. Because she has lost all touch with logic and reason, it is no surprise that she rushes to false conclusions about Turnus’ fate and hastens to kill herself. It is somewhat ironic that while Amata acknowledges her own guilt in bringing about the war (causam clamat crinemque caputque malorum), she is unable to change the pattern of behaviour that led to this situation. In book twelve, she is just as reckless as earlier in book seven, demens and mentem turbata dolore. Moreover, just as at the beginning of the war, her madness is contagious: it spreads like wildfire and excites all the other women around her to rage like madwomen once again.

That Amata kills herself by hanging should be considered important: in the Graeco-Roman literary tradition, the different methods of suicide were ranked differently in honour. Death by sword was the most honourable, manliest way of dying, and women are often represented as lacking the courage for the act—Tacitus’ famous story about Messalina’s inability to end her life by a blade is a good example.⁵⁴ This idea, of course, is strongly related to the conceptual connection between manliness and warfare and to the alleged incompatibility of women and armed violence. The sword is the phallic symbol of male dominance and of the male prerogative to penetrate and kill. As I pointed out above, the fact that Dido kills herself by a sword (Aeneas’ sword, for that matter) underlines the overthrowing of the power dynamics in the story, and stresses her position as the master of her own life and death.

Hanging or strangulation, instead, are ways of dying that in Graeco-Roman literary tradition are generally associated with women—and, in particular, with older women with alleged sexual transgressions.⁵⁵ Again, it is noteworthy that there was an alternative tradition available, according to which Amata starved herself to death: Burke suggests that Virgil deliberately replaces starvation with hanging in order to associate Amata with characters such as Euripides’ Phaedra in Hippolytus and Sophocles’ Jocasta in Oedipus Tyrannus.⁵⁶ These are both ‘elderly’ queens (that is, past their child-bearing years), who hang themselves out of guilt for transgressing the social rules that define normative sexual behaviour. On the basis of this tragic tradition, Burke characterises death by hanging as an “impure” suicide, to which one is driven by guilt.⁵⁷ His reading seems to be supported by Virgil’s choice of words: the poet describes Amata’s way of dying as informe letum.⁵⁸ This therefore implies that there is something shameful about Amata’s death, or about Amata’s character in general—this ‘something’, however, is unspeakable and is never specified.

Zarker and Burke, who read the episode as a loyal variant of the Jocasta and the Phaedra stories, have suggested that Amata’s way of killing herself alludes to her abnormal affection for Turnus.⁵⁹ It is true that from the very beginning, the queen seems to be strangely attracted to the youth, in a manner that confuses maternal feelings with sexual attraction. The first time Turnus is mentioned in book seven, we read that Amata yearned for him with “wondrous passion” to “unite to her as son-in-law” (quem regia coniunx/adiungi generum miro properabat amore).⁶⁰ Later on, when the Fury approaches Amata, she is depicted as “overcome by a woman’s passion” and “troubled by worries and angers over the coming of the Trojans and Turnus’ marriage” (super adventu Teucrum Turnique hymenaeis/feminae ardentem curaeque iraeque coquebant).⁶¹ Her daughter, the bride, is not mentioned at all, and in a confused and confusing way, Amata appears to use her as a channel for her own feelings that are not entirely in line with social decorum.

Moreover, as Zarker points out, Amata’s passionate speech to Turnus upon his departure for battle resembles Dido’s plea to Aeneas when she is trying to make him stay.⁶² She acts like a deceived lover rather than a concerned mother-in-law, and takes Turnus’ refusal to refrain from the duel as a personal insult—rejected by him, there is little reason for her to live on. However, we should note that the Homeric influence is equally clear in this episode, since Amata’s speech is obviously modeled on Hecuba’s plea to Hector in Iliad 22.⁶³ It would appear, in effect, that Virgil deliberately mixes these literary models in order to underline Amata’s inner turmoil and her confusing of maternal affection with sexual attraction.⁶⁴ This is in no way out of character for the queen: out of touch with the logic of the symbolic order as she is, it is not at all surprising that she struggles with the normative definitions of kin relations that hold the society together. And it is even less surprising that the merging of the uncontrolled sex and death drives is what eventually brings about her doom. Since Amata is very much a ‘slave to her body’, she cannot tell apart its different messages. She confuses maternal affection with sexual desire, and sexual desire with self-destruction—eventually, it is the overwhelming desperation caused by the supposed loss of the imaginary son/lover character that makes the queen kill herself.

While the erotic overtones of Amata’s suicide clearly evoke the memory of Dido, I would suggest that Dido is not the only epic queen whose death looms large over Virgil’s Amata. Already in book seven, when Allecto enters Amata’s chamber and finds her worrying about Turnus, the queen’s approaching death is implied with an allusion to Cleopatra. We are told that

huic dea caeruleis unum de crinibus anguem/conicit, inque sinum praecordia ad intima subdit,/quo furibunda domum monstro permisceat omnem./ille inter vestis et levia pectora lapsus/volvitur attactu nullo, fallitque furentem/vipeream inspiras animam; fit tortile collo/aurum ingens coluber, fit longae taenia vittae/innectitque comas et membris lubricus errat.

Verg. Aen. 7.364–353

The goddess flings onto her a snake from her dark hair, and thrusts it into her breast, into her innermost heart, so that, driven mad by that monstrous creature, she would go and enmesh the entire house. Slipping between her clothes and her smooth bosom, it finds its way unfelt by the frantic queen, and breathes its viperous breath. The giant snake becomes a twisted gold necklace; it becomes a garland in her long ribbons, it entwines itself in her hair, and slithers over her limbs.⁶⁵

The passage is rich in an imagery that represents sex and violence as structurally equivalent, and it instantly brings to mind the sensual death of Cleopatra, fetishised in the Roman literary tradition.⁶⁶ It is crucial to note that the allusion to Cleopatra clearly marks Amata as a tragic queen consumed by passion and war-lust who will meet a violent end by her own hand. Thus, the episode tightens the web that connects the reginae moriturae of the Aeneid to each other, and strengthens this epic archetype. However, unlike Cleopatra who, as I argued above, is famously in control of her own death, Amata in this episode appears completely helpless. Unaware of the violation of her bodily integrity, unaware of the snake penetrating her mind through her body, she seems like an object with no control over her fate or over the narrative.

While Amata might be merely an unaware pawn in the games of the gods, her death is, however, structurally significant, since it anticipates and foreshadows the final end of the Latin war. Because she is one of the final casualties of the war, and because she was largely guilty of propagating the conflict, Amata’s death has sometimes been discussed as a ‘surrogate death’ that purges the stage of the guilt of war and paves the way for a lasting peace.⁶⁷ The problem with this kind of reading, however, is that the usefulness of the sacrifice is highly debatable. While Amata clearly acknowledges her guilt at the very end, it remains unclear whether she feels remorse over the war, or if she is merely devastated by its outcome. Unlike Latinus, who at least considers the road not taken, Amata never ponders whether she should have accepted Aeneas as a son-in-law in the first place.⁶⁸ Her suicide is not an attempt to rewrite her earlier mistakes; it is merely an act that frees her from facing their painful consequences. Amata’s death, therefore, is not sacrificial or surrogate in the proper sense of these words: it does not save lives as it could have, had it been committed earlier—instead, it merely completes and closes the circle of violence.

The situation is strikingly similar to that in the Thebaid, where Jocasta kills herself after her failed attempts to mediate between her sons. Once again, the entwined feelings of guilt and grief constitute the motivation for the queen’s desperate deed:

Olim autem inceptae clamore exterrita pugnae/regina extulerat notum penetralibus ensem,/ensem sceptriferi spolium lacrimabile Lai./multaque cum superis et diro questa cubili/et nati furiis et primi coniugis umbris,/luctata est dextrae, et prono vix pectore ferrum/intravit tandem: venas perrumpit aniles/vulnus et infelix lustratur sanguine lectus./illius exili stridentem in pectore plagam/Ismene collapsa super lacrimisque comisque/siccabat plangens: qualis Marathonide silva/flebilis Erigone caesi prope funera patris/questibus absumptis tristem iam solvere nodum/coeperat et fortes ramos moritura legebat.

Stat. Theb. 11.634–647

Then also the queen—frightened by the clamour of the battle that had begun—had brought out the well-known sword from its innermost hiding place—the sword that was a pitiable spoil of sceptred Laius. She made a great complaint about the gods and the dreadful bed and her son’s madness and her first husband’s death; then she struggled with her right hand and at last, leaning her bosom forward, with great difficulty managed to thrust the sword in. The wound breaks her old woman’s veins and the miserable bed is purged with blood. Ismene collapsed upon the blow that creaked in her breast, and dried it with her tears and hair, weeping. Like tearful Erigone, in the Marathonian woods next to the body of her dead father, her laments exhausted, she now began to untie the sad knot and, intent on dying, chose the strong branches.

At first sight, the similarities with Amata’s suicide are striking. Jocasta, too, is driven to her death by a certainty that there is no other way out of the destruction of the war. Whereas Amata knows that Turnus cannot defeat Aeneas, Jocasta knows that either way, her sons’ duel will end with her losing one of them. Furthermore, like Amata’s relationship with Turnus, Jocasta’s relationship with Polynices and Eteocles is marked by strange and threatening sexual overtones. In the perverted Theban royal house, familial affection and sexual attraction are confused even worse than in the Aeneid, and many scholars have suggested that the deeply distorted family relationships form a background to the entire war.⁶⁹ Hershkowitz argues that Polynices and Eteocles are not only each other’s political, but also sexual rivals, and the prize in this competition is sinus matris—translatable either as the mother’s womb or as the mother’s vagina.⁷⁰ Admittedly, this interpretation seems to be supported by lines 11.407–408, where Statius defines the conflict as “a great war of one womb” (unius ingens/bellum uteri). Literally, the lines refer to the kindred enemies born out of the same womb; however, there is a crafty double meaning implying that the womb itself, and thus, the mother, is the cause and the object of the brothers’ rivalry. Since the twins are a result of their mother’s incestuous union with her own son, the confusion concerning the functions of the mother’s genitalia has marked their lives from the very beginning. Denying their quintessential sameness and constructing each other as ‘others’, Polynices and Eteocles compete for the position of being the One for their mother: the One who is of the same flesh and of the same being with her. They seek to ‘return to the mother’s womb’, hence reversing the primal abjection—but how this impossible return should be made is unclear to everyone. To Polynices and Eteocles, taking control of Thebes appears as a symbolic act of taking possession of the mother’s womb, and thus the eroticising vocabulary that associates military conquest with sexual conquest marks these mother-son relationships throughout the epic.

Statius, therefore, appears to deliberately associate Jocasta with Virgil’s Amata, by hinting at the confusion between maternal affection and sexual attraction—but he takes this theme even further, stressing the unhealthy family history of Oedipus’ house as the background to the war. Moreover, it is crucial to note that Jocasta, unlike Amata, is very aware of these circumstances and actively seeks to revoke them. By the time of her death, she seems to have shaken off the role of a chthonic dira and re-entered the symbolic order. multaque cum superis et diro questa cubili/et nati furiis et primi coniugis umbris not only makes it clear that the queen is able to deliver a rational dying speech (in the manner of Virgil’s Dido and Camilla), but also that she acknowledges the underlying reasons for the war. Unlike Amata, Jocasta is now, suddenly, a woman completely in touch with the sphere of logic and reason, and rather than an act of impulse intended to free her from her pain, her suicide is a carefully designed ritual that is meant to symbolically purge the family from its nefas. Unlike Amata, who does not see what is wrong with her relationship with Turnus, Jocasta sees all too well and, as a result, decides to destroy herself.

This reading seems to be supported by the manner of the queen’s suicide. We should note that among the stories about the Theban circle, there were as many different traditions concerning Jocasta’s suicide as there were concerning her motherhood and her mediating role. The most popular and perhaps best-known version is the one in which the queen hangs herself after hearing about her incestuous relationship with her son. Sophocles favours this version in Oedipus Tyrannus, and it is mentioned already in Homer’s Odyssey.⁷¹ In Seneca’s Oedipus, too, Jocasta kills herself upon finding out the truth about her marriage; however, in this version, hanging is replaced by stabbing the womb—a manner of death highly symbolic of her tainted motherhood.⁷² The versions of the story where Jocasta is still present at the Theban war and dies during it, are inclined to favour death by a sword: Euripides’ Phoenissae makes use of this variant, as probably did Seneca’s Phoenissae, the conclusion of which has not survived.⁷³

When Statius depicts Jocasta as killing herself with a sword, this is a narrative choice that clearly distinguishes the queen from Virgil’s Amata, and aligns her death rather with that of Virgil’s Dido, a suicide marked by self-awareness and narrative power.⁷⁴ Whereas Dido pierces herself with Aeneas’ Trojan sword, Jocasta too uses a very particular sword, notum—ensem,/ensem sceptriferi spolium lacrimabile Lai. Technically, this could be a sword that used to belong to her first husband Laius, or it could be the sword with which Oedipus killed Laius—or it could be both, and this is what Statius seems to imply when he describes it as spolium lacrimabile.⁷⁵ Moreover, like Dido, who had carefully placed the sword upon “the Trojan robes and the well-known bed” (Iliacas vestes notumque cubile)⁷⁶ as a reminder of her sexual relationship with Aeneas, Jocasta too kills herself on infelix lectus: a couch that apparently is related to her incestuous relationship with Oedipus. Therefore, just as Dido’s death is depicted as a distortion of her relationship with Aeneas, and as an act that reverses the power dynamics between the two, so Jocasta’s suicide is designed to recall this model and to stress the symbolic meaning of her death.⁷⁷ Her first husband’s sword still carries the stain of a patricide that has thrown the family on to a cycle of self-destruction. Moreover, as a phallic symbol, the sword symbolises the perverted sexual relations that lie at the root of the family’s curse. In short, the instrument embodies the underlying reasons for the Theban war. With this sword, the destruction was begun; it is with the same sword that it must be ended.

The vocabulary that strongly implies sexual intercourse strengthens this impression. When the queen collapses upon the sword, it is told that infelix lustratur sanguine lectus: her death appears as a symbolic deflowering of a bride. The word lustratur, in particular, is noteworthy; instead of staining the bed, Jocasta’s blood ritually purifies it. The queen’s death is symbolic of her first marriage: it metaphorically restores to her the chastity and the innocence of her wedding night. The blood that Jocasta spills washes away the guilt that has stained her bed for many a decade. In a manner similar to Dido, who regrets her union with Aeneas, the Theban queen attempts to undo the past by offering herself as a sacrificial victim. Moreover, as in Dido’s case, the fact that Jocasta herself plunges Laius’ sword into her breast, well aware of the symbolic meaning of the act, reverses the power dynamics of the poem. For the first time in the Thebaid, she is able to escape the marginalised position of an out-of-control woman and becomes a plenipotentiary agent with textual subjectivity, whose train of thought—despite its self-destructive goal—seems rational and understandable to the reader.

Nevertheless, the significance and impact of Jocasta’s act must remain merely symbolic. In the end, she is incapable of changing the course of events by her death: instead of ending the circle of destruction in her family, her suicide actually breeds further violence. For when Ismene sees her mother lying dead on the couch, she in turn falls into a mode of despair and kills herself by hanging. Lavinia’s frantic grief upon the death of her mother is thus taken to new extremes by Statius. Failing to become a proper surrogate death that would save the lives of many through the sacrifice of one, Jocasta in the end falls short of her epic model, Virgil’s Dido, and once again becomes more of an Amata. While Dido deliberately uses her death to breed further violence, Jocasta is simply ineffectual in stopping it. She cannot stand in the way of the destructive drive of Statius’ epic, not by offering herself as an arbiter and not by offering herself as a surrogate victim. At the end of the Thebaid, the familial war finds a symbolic end in the self-destruction of the mother whose womb underlies the conflict.

This means that although the dying queens of Virgil and Statius fail to make any difference when it comes to ending the war, they are important characters when it comes to ending the epic, and to determining its closing tone. As I have argued before, the civil or familial wars in Roman epic are wars within the collective self: they can only end either with a complete collapse of unity and identity or with an acceptance of ‘the stranger in oneself’ and with a formation of a new, coherent identity on this basis. This makes the suicide—the ultimate form of self-destruction—of a character who is neck-deep in the guilt of war an apt closing for Virgil’s and Statius’ war narratives. It is a symbolic ending of the war that foreshadows its actual end. In Virgil’s case, the tragedy ultimately leads to an emergence of a new social harmony where ‘the other’ is accepted as part of the self; in Statius’ epic, it leads to an irreparable disintegration of collective identity and to a complete erasure of the cursed Theban royal line. In these closures, the Virgilian seeking of unity and the Statian confusion in the face of civil war are both powerfully present.