PURSUING ACROSTICS

What follows is an experiment in reading practice. I propose that we read some key passages of the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses in the active pursuit of acrostics and telestics,Footnote ² just as we have been accustomed to read them in the active pursuit of allusions and intertexts; and that we do so with the same willingness to make sense of what we find. The measure of success of this reading practice will be the extent to which our understanding of these familiar and well-studied texts can be usefully enriched by our interpretation of our discoveries (or rediscoveries). These will include an undiscovered authorial signature NASO in the ‘second proem’ of the Metamorphoses; an unnoticed self-referential response to Horace with NITIDO at the centre of Ovid's epic and a similarly self-referential AVSVM at the centre of Virgil's epic; in the Aeneid we will also find glances to Aratus with LEPTE and an Aratean anagram on Aeneas’ shield; and two new acrostics connecting Dido, Ajax and Lavinia.

This experiment is a development of an approach to acrostics for which I have argued in detail elsewhere.Footnote ³ To summarize briefly: I believe that it can be helpful to think about acrostics in the same way as we think about allusion and intertextuality, particularly in two key areas. The first concerns authorial intention: its underlying importance in many discussions of acrostics mirrors a similar importance in discussions of allusion some years ago. In the latter case, there was a general move away from explicit appeals to authorial intention and from use of the intention-bearing term ‘allusion’ to the supposedly more objective ‘intertextuality’ and text-based ‘intertexts’. Even if on this new approach the nature of arguments in support of a textual correspondence changed very little, and even if the intention-bearing author was in fact never far beneath the surface for many of us, this greater focus on the text did have some effect: it encouraged readers who might otherwise have dismissed certain features of a text as fortuitous to submit those features to greater intellectual scrutiny. Some suggestions did not convince; some indeed were wildly fanciful; however, overall, this has been a very productive approach for modern scholarship. I do not propose to discuss the topic of authorial intention or intertextuality vs allusion here: rather, I want to suggest that the key message from these debates is that we should embrace the interpretative possibilities offered by a text—with suitable intellectual rigour, of course: an open mind need not equate to open floodgates.

The second area concerns reading practice: for many of us working on Latin literature (particularly Latin poetry), our reading practice is to read the text in constant pursuit of allusions or intertexts, and this has again proved productive. This approach often assumes, implicitly or explicitly, the existence of a type of ancient reader (the ‘learned reader’) who employed a similar reading practice, a reader also in pursuit of allusions and who in their reception of the text was able to create the same kind of meaning that we do. My approach is to adopt a similar reading practice with reference to acrostics, and to assume that the ancient ‘learned reader’ was also in the habit of reading texts in pursuit of acrostics, and was sensitive to them. Some may want to take this further, and argue that since all writers are presumably readers of their own texts prior to circulation, they would therefore have been aware of the acrostics in their own text, even those which occurred by chance during the process of composition. On this approach, any acrostic that the author felt to be problematic or out of place could have been removed; those that remain in the text can be thought to do so with the tacit approval of the author, whatever the circumstances of their creation. This position assumes of course a maximally attentive author, and, while such an author may not be entirely plausible or theoretically watertight, some may find such a figure useful to think with.

I hope that our experiment will not only show that this is a productive reading strategy, and one which can significantly enhance our interpretation of the text, but also that it will raise interesting questions about ancient textuality more generally.

BEGINNINGS, MIDDLES AND ENDS

Poets often use the beginning, the middle and the end of their works not only to announce their theme or put a seal to their work but also to reflect on the nature of their poetic project and to triangulate their generic or literary affiliations via intertextual reference to earlier texts. The dense metapoetic and allusive content of these structurally significant moments invites and has received close attention. In this section, I want to see what happens when we expand that attention to the edges of the text.

I want to begin with Ovid's Metamorphoses, a text which takes particular delight in playing with a reader's conceptions and expectations regarding beginnings and—in particular—endings, constantly resisting closure. Indeed, it is a poem that is particularly focussed on boundaries and their subversion: boundaries of form, of genre, of narrative and of the physical book roll.Footnote ⁴ In a gesture to this Ovidian subversion, I want to begin at the end of the poem; and (by way of introduction) with an acrostic that has already been noticed.

The close of the Metamorphoses, as Barchiesi has shown, is particularly and playfully complex: the final book seems to be always marking closure, but the story keeps going—the narrator has ‘elaborated an interminable ending’.Footnote ⁵ However, when we finally reach the very end of the poem, and when Ovid finally begins his poetic seal, which he marks with a number of intertextual references to other closural texts,Footnote ⁶ he takes great delight in further complicating its closure (Met. 15.871–9):

Having promised in the opening lines to bring the poem down to ‘my times’ (1.4 mea … tempora), it becomes clear that Ovid's times will in fact last forever (875 perennis, 879 uiuam).Footnote ⁸ Furthermore, as Barchiesi has noted, the very words that announce that the work is finished (iamque opus exegi) begin an (unfinished) acrostic INCIP- (the root of the verb ‘begin’).Footnote ⁹

So there is evidence for acrostic playfulness at the very end of the poem—and also at the very beginning, as I and others have argued elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁰ However, I believe that we can find evidence for similar playfulness—and the first of the new acrostics/telestics I want to propose—not in the first but in the second proem to the work,Footnote ¹¹ which starts at 1.452.

This passage introduces the theme of amor in to the Metamorphoses, whose role in the text will be as central as the word itself is to the MetAMORphoses, providing the motivating force behind a significant number of the metamorphoses that we will encounter. As Miller comments, the ‘story marks an important new beginning, the (abrupt) announcement of what is to be one of the whole poem's principal subjects’.Footnote ¹²

Miller has shown how this passage (as befits a [second] proem) is ‘richly inscribed with allusions to literary beginnings: namely the openings of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid, the start of the war in Virgil's epic, … the beginning of Propertius’ first book of elegies, and (most famously) Ovid's own Amores 1.1’.Footnote ¹³ This introduction of amor/Amor is a key and complex moment in terms of the generic identity of the Metamorphoses: the savage anger of Juno that drives forward the epic Aeneid is recalled in the savage anger of Cupid (which will drive forward the epic Metamorphoses), but Cupid's actions here simultaneously recall his role in forcing Ovid to reject the epic arma of the Aeneid for the elegiac metre of the Amores in Amores 1.1.

It seems entirely appropriate that it is at this moment in the poem, when epic and elegy are first confronted, when the poet's past finds itself in the poet's present, that Ovid chooses to reveal himself, not at the beginning of the line, but at the end, with the telestic in lines 452–5 spelling NASO. This textual revelation of the poet's presence is immediately followed by another, as Apollo's words to Cupid (‘quid'que ‘tibi, lasciue puer, cum fortibus armis …) recall Ovid's own angry response to the same god on being forced to write elegy (Am. 1.1.5–6 quis tibi, saeue puer, dedit hoc in carmina iuris? | Pieridum uates, non tua turba sumus).Footnote ¹⁴

It is worth adding that ancient readers were familiar with the idea of an authorial signature encoded in an acrostic: we find acrostic signatures in a number of authors (for example Nicander, the author of the Ilias Latina and others)Footnote ¹⁵ and hear about them in several more (for instance Ennius);Footnote ¹⁶ scholars have also suggested authorial signatures encoded by other kinds of wordplay.Footnote ¹⁷ One of the more famous/infamous (depending on one's perspective) examples is the authorial signature that has been suggested at Verg. G. 1.429–33, which translates the passage of Aratus’ Phaenomena that contains his famous ΛΕΠΤΗ acrostic (Phaen. 783–7). The claim is that the first syllables of the alternate lines 429, 431 and 433, which give MA-VE-PV, represent the poet's full name PVblius VErgilius MAro in reverse.Footnote ¹⁸ I have no intention of getting into that particular passage here, but it is interesting to note that in Ovid's signature-passage we find a recurrence of the cornua that are thought to be an important signpost to the acrostic in the Georgics passage,Footnote ¹⁹ and these are found in conjunction not with the Phoebe of the Georgics (at 431) but with her brother, Phoebus. Be that as it may, Ovid's claim at the start of the telestic that ‘this did not happen by chance’ (452–6 non | fors ignara dedit) might offer some further textual reassurance of its significance.

We are familiar with the idea that important structural moments such as the beginning(s) and the ending of a poem are marked by intertextual play, and that they offer rewards for those in pursuit of such things. Given the above, we may begin to wonder whether such moments were also marked by textual play, rewarding those in pursuit of acrostics and telestics. With this in mind, let us not forget that, if the beginning and the end are important moments for an author (and reader), so too is the middle.Footnote ²⁰ Space allows only for the briefest mention of this topic, but it is one to which I hope to return in more detail at another time.

As the central book of the Metamorphoses, Book 8 is unsurprisingly full of authorial self-reflection, in both senses of the word—that is to say, both musings on and images of the Metamorphoses and its poet,Footnote ²¹ whether in (for example) Daedalus’ creation of the Labyrinth and its comparison to the river Meander,Footnote ²² or in the shocking scepticism of Pirithous to the idea of metamorphosis.Footnote ²³

In this metapoetic light, the opening words of the book, iam nitidum, may well be a further moment of self-comment, given the stylistic connotations of nitidus and its cognatesFootnote ²⁴—just as the phrase puluinar … politum (‘polished couch’) of Catullus 64 offers a reflection on Catullus’ own foray into epic.Footnote ²⁵ Furthermore, the adjective nitidus has particular point in the context of the provocative challenge offered by Ovid's Metamorphoses to Horace's precepts as presented in the Ars Poetica. As is often noted, Ovid cheerfully flaunts in his poem many of the things Horace encourages an artist to avoid:Footnote ²⁶ the ‘dolphin in the trees, the boar in the waves’ that Horace counsels against at Ars P. 29–30 find themselves at Met. 1.302 and 305; the complex generic texture of the Metamorphoses suggests that Horace's strictures at Ars P. 92 that generic boundaries should be observed received similarly short shrift; perhaps most strikingly of all, where Horace mocks the over-ambition of a cyclic poet who attempts to tell of the entire Trojan war (Ars P. 136–9), and encourages the writer not to start at the beginning (Ars P. 146–8), Ovid—in a typically hyper-competitive gesture—will tell the story not of the entire Trojan war but of the entire history of the universe, from its very beginning.Footnote ²⁷ I have argued elsewhere that Ovid makes an acrostic response to this passage at the beginning of the Metamorphoses;Footnote ²⁸ but our concern now is with the passage in the Ars Poetica that immediately follows. Horace continues at Ars P. 149–52 with the suggestion that an artist should abandon what they cannot make attractive:

Some artists will abandon whatever material they fear will not be able to shine (nitescere). Here, halfway through his colossal unHoratian universal epic, Ovid reminds us that everything is just fine on that score (iam nitidum)—‘now shining…’.

With this in mind, let us turn to the passage that closes the central story of the central book of the Metamorphoses, the lament and transformation of the Meleagrides. This is a moment of exquisite generic friction, as here in the heart of his epic Ovid describes something quintessentially elegiac (tears and lamentation)Footnote ²⁹ with something quintessentially epic (the topos of the many mouths) (Met. 8.533–41):Footnote ³⁰

If we look closely, we can see that this passage is marked by a further moment of authorial self-reflection, specifically one that recalls the very same self-reflection (iam nitidum) with which the book began, with lines 533–8 forming the previously unnoticed acrostic NITIDO, a form which I would take to be the verb nitido (‘I make bright, I polish’), rather than the dative/ablative of the adjective nitidus.Footnote ³¹ Textual confirmation could be found both in the suggestion of close attention in the persequerer of 535 but also more tellingly in the hint at signa in the already suggestive phrase signata … nomina of 540–1.Footnote ³² Here at the heart of the Metamorphoses, Ovid makes a subtle claim for literary brilliance that echoes in form (an acrostic) and meaning (‘elegance’) the famous LEPTE acrostic of Aratus, while at the same time underlining his transcendence of Horatian limitations.

At this point I would like to note an interesting coincidence. Taking Tarrant's recent text of the Metamorphoses, and accepting all his decisions as regards lines to be deleted and lines to be kept, we have a text with 11,908 lines. On that basis, the mathematical middle of the Metamorphoses would be lines 5954 and 5955, that is to say, lines 535 and 536 of Book 8, which form the middle of this acrostic. In other words, this acrostic is to be found not only at the climax of the central story of the central book but also in the very centre of the poem itself.Footnote ³³

Emboldened by our productive pursuit of acrostics at the beginning, middle and end of the Metamorphoses, let us now turn to Virgil. Acrostics of various kinds have been proposed at the beginning and ends of Virgil's works (some more plausibly than others): FONS at the beginning of the Eclogues;Footnote ³⁴ the right-angle acrostic OTIA at the end of the Georgics;Footnote ³⁵ at the beginning of the Aeneid variously ALMA (in alternate lines) or ALMAE MOS (in an alternate line akroteleuton),Footnote ³⁶ or A STILO M(aronis) V(ergili) in a boustrophedon acrostic;Footnote ³⁷ I have elsewhere discussed the possibility of a less gymnastic ILVM, in lines 2–5; a telestic STO at lines 1–3; and a reverse telestic SAT in the final three lines of the poem.Footnote ³⁸ Wordplay that looks back to Homer has also been detected at the beginning of the Aeneid;Footnote ³⁹ wordplay that looks back to Aratus has been detected at the start of the Georgics, with an authorial signature of sorts;Footnote ⁴⁰ and various other authorial signatures have been suggested throughout his works.Footnote ⁴¹ For reasons of space I do not propose to discuss any of these (or other proposed acrostics in Virgil),Footnote ⁴² but I want instead to think briefly about the middle of the poem.

As it happens, the end of Book 6 and the beginning of Book 7 do not seem to provide any obvious acrostic material.Footnote ⁴³ But the reader on the lookout for acrostics will find something in a passage a little later in Book 7 that is connected to middles, in the sense that it looks back to the middle of the Georgics and indeed marks itself as a middle. Given the methodological problems involved, I will do no more than note the coincidence that the passage occurs, like the Metamorphoses passage above, almost exactly at the mathematical middle of our text of the Aeneid.Footnote ⁴⁴ The passage in question involves the description of Latinus’ temple at Aen. 7.170–91, a temple where we are told (7.169) Latinus sits medius, ‘in the middle’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The description of this temple looks back to the description of Virgil's poetic temple in the middle of the Georgics (at the beginning of Book 3), and in the middle of the description we find an acrostic (Aen. 7.177–82):Footnote ⁴⁶

This line of Italian ancestors, hewn out of ancient cedar (an interesting contrast to the Parian marble of Verg. G. 3.33–5), forms the acrostic AVSVM (‘bold deed’), an acrostic signposted by the phrases ex ordine (177) and ab origine (181).Footnote ⁴⁸ The word is a significant one, in that audacia (‘daring’) and its cognates are often associated with a bold creative endeavour,Footnote ⁴⁹ but, more specifically, it is used in this sense a number of times by Virgil in structurally significant locations. The word bookends the Georgics: at the start of the poem it looks forward to the poem Virgil is about to begin (G. 1.40 audacibus adnue coeptis),Footnote ⁵⁰ and at the end it looks back to the Eclogues (G. 4.565 carmina qui lusi pastorum audaxque iuuenta, | Tityre, te patulae cecini sub tegmine fagi).Footnote ⁵¹ Furthermore, on one reading of Odes 1.3, Horace seems to associate the adjective audax specifically with the writing of the Aeneid;Footnote ⁵² and this use by Horace of audeo in relationship to the Aeneid features again in an intertextual acrostic game all about the development of one's poetic career.Footnote ⁵³ Given Virgil's interest in the presentation of his poetic career,Footnote ⁵⁴ the suggestions that at this point in the Aeneid he looks back to the centre of the Georgics, to a passage in which he looked forward (in one sense) to the Aeneid,Footnote ⁵⁵ and that he should annotate this self-reflection with the word he used to describe his composition of both the Eclogues and the Georgics, seem entirely appropriate; even more so if, as Stephen Heyworth suggests to me, we can see an authorial signature concealed in the final line.Footnote ⁵⁶ Here at the heart of the Aeneid then, we find not Maecenas, not Augustus, but the poet himself.

To conclude this section: we are familiar with the idea that at important structural moments readers on the lookout for intertextual play are often rewarded; it would seem that at such moments readers on the lookout for textual play (be it acrostics, telestics or other wordgames) are also rewarded. To these examples could be added others that have been suggested elsewhere in OvidFootnote ⁵⁷ and in other authors such as Propertius, Catullus and Horace:Footnote ⁵⁸ together these examples suggest that the proposed reading strategy can at the very least produce some interesting stories about familiar texts.

THE EKPHRASTIC EDGE AND BEYOND

In his 2004 article, Damschen argued for a kind of acrostic intertextuality,Footnote ⁵⁹ where one author's acrostic looks back to another author's acrostic, and perhaps also to that acrostic's ‘source’ in another author's acrostic. Whether or not one is convinced by his particular example,Footnote ⁶⁰ the idea of one author's acrostic reproducing or responding to another's seems to me to be a very strong one. It is often suggested, for example, that Aratus’ LEPTE acrostic looks back to the LEUKE acrostic in Homer;Footnote ⁶¹ and that Nicander's authorial acrostic signature looks both to Aratus’ acrostic and to Aratus’ own authorial signature in the Phaenomena;Footnote ⁶² and it has recently been argued that an OTIA acrostic in Horace looks back to and engages with Virgil's OTIA acrostic at the end of the Georgics,Footnote ⁶³ and it may be that Virgil's AVSVM acrostic may look back in part to this passage in Horace. One could make a case that Ovid's incomplete INCIP- acrostic at the close of the Metamorphoses engages with the incomplete DESIN- acrostic in Catullus 36 (a poem all about epic poetry and the cessation of writing)—it is worth noting that to do so we need to make no special claim about the intentionality or otherwise of the latter acrostic, only that Ovid noticed it and responded to it.Footnote ⁶⁴ Another example, of course, would be the MA-VE-PV authorial signature mentioned above: the claim is that this signature is Virgil's response to Aratus’ LEPTE acrostic.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, a better example can be found in the presence in Virgil's text of the acrostic LEPTE itself, which once again we find at a highly significant moment in the poem.

It is worth pausing here for a moment to reflect on the reasons why Virgil's direct reproduction of Aratus’ LEPTE acrostic, which is perhaps the most famous classical acrostic amongst modern scholars, went unnoticed for so long, especially given its presence in a much-studied passage. The simple answer is that until recently no one was looking. However, now that a growing number of scholars are paying attention to the edges of the text, there have been several independent sightings: I was feeling very pleased with myself for being the first to notice it until I discovered it had already been spotted by Neil Adkin in 2014 and by Alessandro Fusi in 2016.Footnote ⁶⁶

Just as the key structural moments of the beginning, middle and end provide the author with the opportunity for self-reflection, so too do those passages in which an author describes a work of art, or the creation of a work of art. We find a number of such passages in the Aeneid, but the longest and most detailed of all are those connected with the shield of Aeneas (8.370–453, 520–40, 608–728). It is not just the number of lines that mark this particular work of art as something special. In terms of content, the shield itself contains the historical climax of the Aeneid, namely the victory of Augustus at Actium and the triple triumph that follows.Footnote ⁶⁷ Hardie sees the shield, which he terms a ‘cosmic icon’,Footnote ⁶⁸ as the climax of the poem more generally,Footnote ⁶⁹ arguing that it presents ‘the final and most vivid realization’ of Virgil's identification of cosmos and imperium.Footnote ⁷⁰ In terms of literary texture, the description of the shield, of its manufacture and of the events leading up to its creation are full of intricate and sophisticated intertextual play, as has been well documented.Footnote ⁷¹

The shield passage is also intensely metapoetic: clearly Vulcan and Virgil are both engaged on the same task of creating Aeneas’ shield, and we are frequently reminded of this fact. An early example of this comes with the striking simile that compares the early-rising Vulcan (and, proleptically, his Cyclopes) to a woman and her famulae at their wool (8.407–15)—weaving is of course the metaphor for literary creation par excellence. Amidst all this sophisticated literary play, it is no surprise to find that the weaver's concern is with a tenui Minerua (409), given that tenuis is one of the key adjectives (along with deductum, a metaphor from wool-working) used to evoke the leptotēs of the Alexandrians.

As the artist puts all other creative endeavours on hold to begin the substantial task of creating the shield, in the fire and smoke of Vulcan's furnaces the homely image of women at their wool becomes one of more appropriate epic grandeur: creation is now not so much a case of spinning and weaving as the huge arms of the Cyclopes hammering out metal: 8.451–2 illi inter sese multa ui bracchia tollunt | in numerum, uersant tenaci forcipe massam (‘they with mighty force, now one, now another, raise their arms in measured cadence, and turn the metal with gripping tongs’). They do so, appropriately enough, in numerum, that is to say, ‘in rhythm’, or even ‘into poetry’.

But whether they are weaving or forging or writing, the end product of this creative effort will unite all three image systems in the non enarrabile textum of 8.625.Footnote ⁷² But we are not yet done with images of creation: in order to (one might say) hammer home the metapoetic point, the opening image on the shield is of the wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, bending her head back in an intertextual gesture,Footnote ⁷³ and licking her cubs into shape in a metatextual one: for this is the very image that Virgil is said to have used of his own creative process.Footnote ⁷⁴

That Vulcan working on the shield is in some way a reflection of Virgil working on the shield is clear, but the hall of mirrors comes closest to vanishing point with the depiction of the shields of the Salii (the ancilia) at 8.664–5: there we read lapsa ancilia caelo | extuderat (‘he had hammered out shields fallen from heaven’). This is a moment where, in the words of Barchiesi, ‘the wording collapses the difference between the two levels of narration and description’.Footnote ⁷⁵ As Putnam notes, extuderat is the most graphic of the verbs used to describe Vulcan's actions: this helps to draw attention to this moment where Virgil, in describing a scene on his shield (which will come down from the heavens), describes Vulcan hammering out a scene on his shield which in turns depicts shields—the ancilia—that come from heaven.Footnote ⁷⁶ The mise-en-abyme finally engulfs us when we remember the crucial point about these ancilia, namely that they themselves are copies, the result of repeated imitation of the one original shield that came from heaven.Footnote ⁷⁷

The passage is also notable for its content: it seems to begin with the Gauls on the Capitol, but the presence of the Salii and the Luperci followed so closely by Cato and Catiline in the Underworld is striking. These elements have proved troublesome for those seeking a thematic unity to the images on the shield.Footnote ⁷⁸ Even if we accept the idea that the Salii, the Luperci and the matronae evoke the re-establishment of Roman religious norms after the Gallic threat, the chronological leap (and the tonal shift) from the early fourth-century history to the late Republican figures of Cato and Catiline in the Underworld is striking.Footnote ⁷⁹ If Virgil's historiography, like most Roman historiography, has an hour-glass shape, then this is the almost infinitely slender middle section.Footnote ⁸⁰ We make another significant jump too, in terms of the topography of the shield: the attack of the Gauls on the Capitol is depicted at the top of the shield (652 in summo), and presumably (if not explicitly) with lines 666–8 (hinc procul addit | Tartareas etiam sedes, alta ostia Ditis) we move to the bottom.

So let us look at this intensely self-referential passage, when author, artist and artwork collapse into one, this delicate middle, this moment where we move from one edge to another and see what we find (Verg. Aen. 8.663–70):

It is here, on the edge of Aeneas’ shield, on the famous icon of the Roman cosmos, that we find the acrostic that was both the hallmark and the demonstration of Aratus’ own poetic kosmos,Footnote ⁸¹ the LEPTE acrostic of Phaen. 783–7.Footnote ⁸² For a final flourish, and some textual confirmation,Footnote ⁸³ let us look more closely at line 667 Tartareas etiam sedes, alta ostia Ditis. The line is almost identical to Verg. G. 4.467 Taenarias etiam fauces, alta ostia Ditis, but the Taenarias … fauces of the Georgics have been replaced by Tartareas … sedes, inviting scrutiny of this change. We do not have to look too hard in the ‘Tartarean seats’ to find ARATEA: a nod to the original author of the acrostic and yet another example of wordplay involving this poet's name.Footnote ⁸⁴

DIDO, AJAX AND LAVINIA

So far we have been looking at passages that invite particular readerly scrutiny, but, emboldened by what we have found there, I want now to move into less strongly marked narrative. In the Aeneid even this narrative is intertextually dense and rewards the reader in pursuit of allusion; perhaps it may also reward the reader in pursuit of acrostics.

Let us begin with Dido. She is one of Virgil's most vivid characters, yet at the same time she is a highly complex literary construction, incorporating elements from a bewildering variety of different models, both literary and historical. She is at various times Circe and Calypso, Nausicaa and Penelope; she is the Medea of Apollonius and of Euripides, the loyal Alcestis and the abandoned Ariadne, not to mention Helen or Hypsipyle; she is Cleopatra with a hint of Hannibal.Footnote ⁸⁵ That Dido's gender status is a complicated one is further underlined by her proximity to the sex-swapping femina Caeneus in the Underworld,Footnote ⁸⁶ by the glimpse of Hercules that we see (or think we see) when Aeneas first catches sight of her there,Footnote ⁸⁷ and by the links forged between her and perhaps her most striking and surprising model, the towering hero Ajax.

The relationship between Dido and Ajax is a familiar one,Footnote ⁸⁸ so I will be brief. That Dido in the Underworld casts a very similar shadow to the Homeric Ajax is well known: both stand in silence, refusing to speak to the man they hold responsible for their death.Footnote ⁸⁹ In Book 4, however, it is not the Homeric but the Sophoclean Ajax who supplies the model for Dido. Sophocles’ play opens with the revelation that Ajax has just slaughtered whole flocks of cattle and sheep; we then learn that in fact Ajax had intended to slaughter Odysseus, the Atreidae and other of his comrades, in revenge for being denied the arms of Achilles, but Athena had fooled him into attacking animals instead. When Ajax realizes that he has been fooled, he fears that he will become a laughing stock, and decides to commit suicide, which—after some subterfuge—he does using a sword given to him by Hector. So both Ajax and Dido are driven to suicide; both will deceive those closest to them as regards their suicidal intentions; both make similar speeches before they kill themselves; both kill themselves with a sword given as a gift by a Trojan; and both die in isolation from their family. However, there is a more general connection between the two in that they are motivated by a similar temperament. Tatum notes that both are very much concerned with their reputation (Ajax his τιμή, Dido her fama); and Panoussi makes the point that what drives both to suicide is the violation of a value they hold dear: the aidōs of Ajax corresponds closely to the pudor of Dido.Footnote ⁹⁰

So let us look at the moment at which Dido first introduces the term, and its importance to her, at the beginning of Book 4:

She continues:

The very line which introduces the important theme of pudor, the quality that links Dido and Ajax and motivates their two stories,Footnote ⁹¹ happens to be the same line that begins the acrostic AIAS.Footnote ⁹²

Let us turn now to another character in the Aeneid who is notable for her pudor, indeed, whose most significant moment in the poem is a physical manifestation of her pudor, a figure who is in many ways a reflection of Dido, a Dido in reverse, namely Lavinia.

Lavinia forms a fascinating counterpoint to Dido: either of these two women could have been the regia coniunx promised by Creusa in Book 2,Footnote ⁹³ but other than that they are diametrically opposed. Whereas Dido is passionately eloquent, Lavinia is famously silent; whereas Aeneas’ union with Lavinia will result in the birth of Postumus Silvius and the generation of the Roman race (according to one genealogy), Aeneas’ failed union with Dido results in the metaphorical birth of Hannibal and the generation of a destructive enmity between Rome and Carthage. Whereas it seems that Aeneas had strong feelings for Dido, the importance of Lavinia to him seems to be entirely political.

The two are also interestingly linked in terms of their pudor. As is frequently noted, Lavinia does very little in the Aeneid, and of her few appearances, two are particularly marked by displays of pudor, both of which are linked to Dido. The first is when she accompanies Amata and other Latin matres in a visit to the temple of Athena at 11.477–80, where we are told that Lavinia ‘keeps her beautiful eyes lowered’ (oculos deiecta decoros). The Latin women replay the scene in Il. 6.297–310, where the Trojan women also visit a temple of Athena, who rejects their prayers with a movement of her head (6.311 ἀνένευε δὲ Παλλὰς ᾿Αθήνη).Footnote ⁹⁴ Virgil has already reproduced this Iliadic scene in the paintings in the Carthaginian temple of Juno: there Athena's negative response is described slightly differently (1.482 diua solo fixos oculos auersa tenebat),Footnote ⁹⁵ as Athena shows her disapproval by keeping her eyes fixed on the ground. This pose is of course exactly the same pose that Dido strikes in the Underworld, in her Ajax-like refusal to acknowledge Aeneas: 6.469 illa solo fixos oculos auersa tenebat. So while Lavinia's downward gaze recalls Athena and Dido, it is of a very different kind: Lavinia's pose here is not one of power but rather of pudicitia.

If her first display of pudor links her to Dido and indirectly to Ajax, so too does her second, her most famous moment in the entire Aeneid. So how does Lavinia, the anti-Dido, display her pudor here (Aen. 12.64–71)?

She blushes—the classic display of pudor—but she does so in a way that intriguingly evokes Dido. The strong and violently metaphorical uiolauerit takes us back to the line that introduced Dido's pudor (ante, pudor, quam te uiolo at 4.27), but the same passage is evoked in another way. In the moment that Lavinia's pudor is most clearly revealed, in a moment intertextually linked to the introduction of Dido's pudor, we find precisely the same acrostic as we did there, except this time in reverse, with AIAS running from line 71 to 68.Footnote ⁹⁶