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VirgilAeneid
Fiction | Novel/Book in Verse | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Aeneas
The son of Venus and Anchises and the father of Ascanius, Aeneas is the protagonist of Virgil’s poem, but he is an unusual hero. He is not particularly adept in battle, as Achilles was. He is not particularly resourceful, as Odysseus was. In fact, he is often somewhat clueless. He repeatedly makes mistakes, particularly in the first half of the poem: He founds cities in the wrong places, he misreads oracles, he stumbles and hurts people and fails. He is often pictured not in glory, but in despair: “he suffered profoundly in war to establish a city” (Book 1, line 5).
Perhaps most challengingly of all, particularly to the modern audience, Aeneas does not seem to have much free will. He is defined by his piety (Latin: pietas)—that is, by his subservience to the gods, to (the idea of) the Roman state, and to his family. At every turn, he subordinates his own will to that of the authorities, often hurting others (and himself) in the process.
However, this trait makes Aeneas a uniquely Roman hero. His obedience to the will of the gods, even when he does not understand their plans, eventually guides him to his destiny in Italy. His love for his father and his son provided a powerful model for the Romans of filial and paternal devotion. Perhaps most importantly, his unification of disparate peoples and ending of civil conflict make him a literary mirror for the first Roman emperor, Augustus, who ended the Roman civil wars and brought about an unprecedented era of peace.
Since Aeneas is defined by the pious subservience of his will to his duty, it is one of the great mysteries (and appeals) of the Aeneid that in many ways his final act—the slaying of Turnus—is utterly selfish and utterly personal. For the first time in the narrative, Aeneas is doing something for himself. He gives in to his anger at the death of his friend Pallas and—arguably—goes against the gods, the state, and his father all at once. Anchises told him in Book 6 that to be Roman is to exhibit “Mercy for those cast down and relentless war upon proud men” (Book 6, 852-53), but in the end, Aeneas denies mercy to the conquered with the very act that, paradoxically, founds Rome and ends the poem. Virgil invites the reader to reflect on whether this means Aeneas has failed as a Roman—or if, perhaps, something of his action here gets to the very essence of what being Roman is all about. Whether this is a criticism or a complement to the Roman national identity the poet leaves to us to decide.
Dido
The queen of the Carthaginians and favorite of their city’s patron goddess, Juno, Dido is the human antagonist of the first half of the poem. Virgil introduces her in Book 1 as an ideal leader to her people. She has already achieved what Aeneas is still struggling to find: the foundation of a new city. It is the gods—Juno and Venus—who frivolously arrange Dido’s infatuation with Aeneas, causing her to isolate herself from potential husbands and allies in Africa and, more damning still, to break her vow of chastity to her deceased husband, Sychaeus. This is a sin for which Dido has substantial trouble forgiving herself, again emphasizing her goodness. Chastity was the most important virtue for women in Roman culture.
Dido is one of the many figures in the Aeneid who is overcome by irrationality. Men usually display this in a battle rage; in Dido’s case, her madness is expressed as extreme romantic passion. Virgil links her to other mythological women who were wronged by their lovers, most prominently Euripides’s Medea, but the Roman audience would have also mapped her onto Cleopatra, whom the Augustan regime painted as a dangerous Eastern seductress.
Despite these unpleasant associations with Egypt and with Rome’s other great rival, Carthage, Virgil is sympathetic to Dido and her plight. He is intensely interested in her point of view and interior life; he focalizes much of Book 4 through her perspective. Though, like many of the women in the Aeneid, Dido represents a barrier to Aeneas’s settling in Italy, her death represents a tragedy. She, like many young lovers and fighters in the poem, dies before her time.
Turnus
Turnus, the legendary leader of the Rutulians, is the human antagonist of the second half of Virgil’s poem, mirroring Dido’s role in the first half. Turnus is Juno’s main human pawn in her attempts to thwart Aeneas but he, like his opponent, cannot be pigeonholed with simple black-and-white terms. Turnus stands as the primary obstacle to the founding of the Roman state, but from another perspective, he is the victim. The Italian princess Lavinia is betrothed to Turnus before Aeneas arrived to invade their homeland, much as the Greeks did Troy. Turnus is the new Achilles in Italy, which Apollo prophesied, but in defending his people from an invading force, he can also be read as Hector.
Most importantly of all, Turnus is a decent person. He had no interest in going to war until he was infected with rage by the Fury Allecto (Book 7, lines 435-44). Like Aeneas, the gods (or fate) play a heavy role in determining his life and his choices. Virgil emphasizes his bravery in battle and his physical prowess, as well as his skills at oration. Turnus’s sin, if any, is that he is still rooted in a Homeric way of thinking. He wants to fight it out on the battlefield rather than rationally agreeing to terms. In the end, the reader may be left unsure if his death was necessary for the founding of Rome or a senseless waste of young life.
Juno
The goddess of marriage and the wife and sister of Jupiter, Juno is the primary divine antagonist of the Aeneid. She sided with the Greeks in the Trojan War due to various Trojan slights against her, but she hates the Trojans most of all because she knows their Roman descendants will bring about the fall of her favorite city: Carthage, which Rome defeated in the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE).
Juno is, first and foremost, an agent of narrative delay. While she cannot circumvent Jupiter’s will that Aeneas found the Roman people, she will throttle it as much as possible (Book 7, lines 313-15). Her agents are primarily female (e.g., Dido, Rumor, the Latin queen Amata, the Fury Allecto, and Turnus’s sister Juturna). The reconciliation between Juno (as the feminine force) and her husband Jupiter (the masculine force) in Book 12 represents a reestablishment of cosmic balance, an important concept for Virgil’s ordered vision of the universe.
