Uncovering Anna Perenna by Gwynaeth McIntyre;Sarah McCallum;

Author:Gwynaeth McIntyre;Sarah McCallum; [McCallum, Gwynaeth McIntyre and Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350048454
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2018-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

PRAEBUIT AENEAS ET CAUSAM MORTIS ET ENSEM.

IPSA SUA DIDO CONCIDIT USA MANU.

Aeneas provided the reason for her death and the sword. Dido herself fell by her own hand.

Fast. 3.549–50; Ep. 7.195–6

While the epitaph acts as a seal for the narrative of Dido in Ep. 7, it is now, in the expansive Roman world of the Fasti, a dividing mark for the continuation of the Carthaginian story through Dido’s sister Anna. The epitaph, repeated in this new context, marks Ovid’s renewed bid for authorial control over Virgil’s poem in the fragmentation of its teleological narrative. In so doing, he gains the cooperation of his established readers, who would recognize the repetition of the epitaph from the Heroides and would remember its condemnation of Aeneas as treacherous and responsible for Dido’s suicide. Thus already at the start of this continuation of Book 4 of the Aeneid the reader’s disposition is shaped towards suspicion of the Aeneas of the Fasti. And, as Sarah McCallum shows in this volume (Ch. 1), Ovid’s Anna also carries the ambiguity of Virgil’s Anna who incorporates memories of the well-known alternative tradition, that she, rather than Dido, was Aeneas’s lover.27

As Dido’s sister, Anna is a virtual double of Dido, but she is also in many respects a double of Aeneas.28 For, according to Ovid’s parodic narrative, like the Trojan hero she has to flee from Carthage after Dido’s suicide; she also, like him, wanders in exile searching for a home, and suffers shipwreck after a terrible storm (Ov. Fast. 3.551–600). Anna’s journey, however, lacks divine guidance or intervention. This repetition with a female protagonist of Aeneas’s journey to Carthage and Italy in the Aeneid is a masterpiece of elegiac compression of epic themes. Ovid had repeated Aeneas’s episodes of exile and storms previously with another character, his Diomedes in the Metamorphoses (Met. 14.476–9). Thus in the Fasti too we are invited to read Anna’s Aeneas-like wanderings through an Ovidian lens with perhaps, as Stephen Hinds suggests, ‘its own vestigial claims to set its own agenda’.29

On Anna’s arrival in Italy, the doubling, and indeed reversal, of roles becomes more complex as Anna shifts between the roles of Dido and of Aeneas, depending on the internal focalization of the characters. In the Aeneid Aeneas was shipwrecked on Carthaginian shores and was welcomed by Dido; in the Fasti Anna is shipwrecked on the shore of Italy, very close to Lavinium, Aeneas’s new settlement in Italy, and is welcomed by Aeneas as an exile, like his former self in need of hospitality (Ov. Fast. 3.601–36). To Aeneas’s wife Lavinia, however, Anna appears as Dido’s double and thus her hated rival. Ovid coins the new adverb furialiter (in the manner of a Fury, 637) to describe Lavinia’s mad jealousy of Anna. Lavinia, whose main role in the Aeneid was to appear as the silent object of desire for the two rival males and whose marriage to Aeneas was the lynchpin of reconciliation between Italians and Trojans, now appears in a different light as a divisive, destructive Fury intent on killing Anna.

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