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Didone hard-core
2006-08-21T10:36:06Z
Abstract
A scarcely investigated fragment testifying to the “fortune” of the character of Dido is the integral reuse of Aen. IV 415 in Auson. epigr. 75 Green. The line quoted from Virgil, ne quid inexpertum frustra moritura relinquat, that in Aeneid occurs after Dido has failed to prevent Aeneas from departing, and crucially marks the queen’s resolution to kill herself, in Ausonius closes, like an aprosdoketon, the didascalia of a pornographic tableau, in which Crispa is engaged with four partners at the same time. Behind Ausonius’ mulier impudica we can glimpse the Carthaginian queen. This procedure is backed by the allegorical reading, practiced at least from the 5th century, which interprets Dido as the personification of libido (hence Dante will set her up in the second round of his Inferno). Ausonius’ epigram, then, can be read as a sneer to the commonplace that makes Dido an exemplum of feminine virtue - as the woman who ascended onto the pyre in order to escape the marriage with the Gaetulian king and to remain faithful to her late husband, Sichaeus - and, according to the Christian standard view, a paradigm of mulier uniuira. Ausonius thus stresses to the utmost that feature of the Virgilian Dido which was most popular amongst the Romans, or at any rate amongst those of Late Antiquity, namely her sensuality.