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Aristotle and Dido's Hamartia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

J. L. Moles
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Extract

Scholars have long recognized that the story of Dido in the Aeneidis structured like a Greek tragedy and that several of Aristotle's concepts in the Poetics can profitably be applied to it. Here I return to an old question, to which no answer yet given has commanded general assent: if Dido is a tragic heroine, what, in Aristotelian terms, is her hamartia? I shall argue that Aristotle's model of tragedy provides a useful blueprint for gauging both Dido's moral responsibility for her downfall and the moral and emotional response to it which Virgil expects from his readers. These matters have indeed been very extensively discussed by very distinguished scholars, but in many areas of classical literature – and nowhere more than in the Aeneid – modern criticism has become so sophisticated and so attuned to the detection of subtleties such as irony, ambiguity, and ambivalence that it sometimes misses the significance of what is simple and obvious. Aristotle's model of tragedy, while not a refined critical tool, helps us to isolate some basic truths about the tragedy of Dido.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , April 1984, pp. 48 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1984

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References

Notes

1. For the relevance of tragedy and Aristotle's prescriptions to the Dido story, see most recently Muecke, F., AJP 104 (1983), 134–55Google Scholar (with full bibliography). Rudd, N., Lines of Enquiry (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 32–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, surveys various interpretations of Dido's ‘culpa’/hamartia and concludes on an agnostic note. Whether Virgil had read the Poetics naturally cannot be established. It is chronologically possible that he had, even if one believes that Aristotle's major treatises went out of general circulation in the Hellenistic period: cf. Earl, D., ANRW 1.2 (1972), pp. 850ff.Google Scholar on the date of their re-emergence in Rome. On the other hand, Brink, C. O., Horace on Poetry I (Cambridge, 1963), p. 140Google Scholar finds ‘no evidence of any first-hand knowledge of Aristotle's Poetics in Horace's time’. What matters here is that Aristotle's prescriptions seem to work both with Greek tragedy and the story of Dido and that they had currency in early Augustan Rome, though perhaps only through intermediaries such as Neoptolemus.

2. It is of course not meant to be: Aristotle is trying to define the essence of tragedy, necessarily a process of simplification and generalization.

3. I here follow the views of Stinton, T. C. W., CQ 25 (1975), 221–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar, with my own modifications in CQ 29 (1979), 77–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. For this interpretation of τῸ φιλάνӨρωπον, cf. Hubbard, M. E. in Ancient Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1972), p. 106 n. 2Google Scholar; Stinton (n. 3), 238 n. 2.

5. ομοιος certainly implies ‘not very bad’; whether it also implies ‘not very good’ (as usually argued) is less clear: see my discussion (n. 3), 92–4.

6. Translated by Hubbard (n. 4), pp. 106–7, except that I have left ἁμαρτίαν as it stands.

7. Cf. n. 3 above.

8. I stress here (since this is often misunderstood) that Aristotle's view of the moral element in tragedy is radically different from Plato's. Aristotle does not require that tragedy should be morally improving: his point is that if the plots of tragedy do not harmonize, more or less, with the audience's moral sense, this interferes with the aesthetic purpose of tragedy – the arousal of pity and fear.

9. Cf. the interesting observations of Foster, J., PVS 13 (1973–1974), 32Google Scholar.

10. According to Williams, G., Tradition and Originality in Roman Poetry (Oxford, 1968), p. 379Google Scholar, the wording echoes ‘the last words of the Spartan ambassador at the end of the last peace conference before the Peloponnesian War (Thucydides ii. 12.3)’- Maybe so, but the colouring of the Spartan ambassador's words is itself epic/tragic, and this colouring is what is important in our passage.

11. See ThLL and OLD s.v.

12. Most scholars assume this equivalence.

13. For similar arguments, cf. Monti, R. C., The Dido Episode and the Aeneid (Leiden, 1981), p. 106–7 n. 29Google Scholar.

14. Williams (n. 10), p. 379.

15. Cf. Monti (n. 13), loc. cit.

16. ThLL, s.v., IV, col. 1302, 67–1303, 18.

17. Williams (n. 10), pp. 378ff.

18. Page, ad loc. has some characteristically good observations.

19. It will be clear why I completely disagree with the arguments of Farron, S., ‘The Aeneas-Dido Episode as an Attack on Aeneas' Mission and Rome’, G &R 27 (1980), 34–47Google Scholar. Nor can I accept the ‘morality is irrelevant’ attitude of Feeney, D., CQ 33 (1983), 205 n. 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar (‘it is not a matter of “judging”, still less of deciding which “side” we favour’). In Book 4, vv. 169–72 and 393 are explicit moral ‘sign-posts’.