65 pages • 2 hours read
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.
Books 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Book 3 Summary
Like Book 2, Book 3 is narrated by Aeneas at Dido’s feast. After the fall of Troy, Aeneas first tries to found a town called Aeneadae in Thrace (northern Greece) but receives an awful portent: When he cuts some dogwood to decorate an altar, it oozes blood (26-29). Aeneas hears the disembodied voice of Polydorus, a Trojan prince who had been living at the court of the Thracian king and was speared by the Thracians for his money when Troy fell; these spears form the wood Aeneas hacked into (55-57). Anchises convinces Aeneas to abandon Aeneadae as the place is cursed by the Thracians’ treachery. They give Polydorus a proper funeral and sail to the island of Delos.
Delos is sacred to the god of prophecy, Apollo. After conducting the proper rituals, Aeneas asks Apollo where they should establish their new city. A booming voice answers: The Trojans must settle in “the first land that nurtured your parents’ / roots […] Go, then, in search of your ancient, original mother!” (94-96). Anchises consults his knowledge of Trojan lore and concludes that Apollo must mean Crete, the home of the Trojan ancestor Teucer. They sail there along the eastern coast of Greece and, again, try to establish a town. This time, they are hit with a plague (136-42). Anchises urges a return to Delos to consult Apollo again; something is wrong (Apollo is the god of plague, too). That night, Aeneas has a supernatural dream about the household gods that he took with him from Troy. Sent by Apollo, they confirm that Crete is not the correct location—the Trojans must go to Italy, where another of their ancestors, Dardanus, was born (162-66).
On the way, the Trojans are hit by another storm and driven to the Strophades, Greek islands inhabited by the Harpies. The Harpies are mythological monsters with the bodies of birds and the faces of girls. The Trojans try to butcher and eat the Harpies’ cattle (as Odysseus’s crew tried to kill and eat the Cattle of the Sun in Book 12 of the Odyssey), but the Harpies fight back. Celaeno, their leader, prophesies that the Trojans will not be able to fortify their future city in Italy until “dire famine avenging the wrong done to us by this slaughter / drives you to gnaw with your jaws at your tables and then to devour them” (256-57).
After a year of wandering, the Trojans hear that Andromache, the wife of Aeneas’s cousin Hector, has set up another Troy in Greece. Andromache was taken as a slave by Achilles’s cruel son Pyrrhus (who killed king Priam at the end of Book 2). After Pyrrhus himself was killed in a love spat with another Greek hero, Orestes, Andromache married Helenus, a Trojan prophet. Together they set up this second Troy, even naming many of the landmarks after the fallen city (321-37). Using his prophetic power, Helenus predicts that Aeneas’s journey will be long and arduous, but he will know where to settle when he sees an albino sow with 30 piglets (390-95). Helenus also details how to safely sail to Italy, specifically Cumae, where Aeneas must consult with another seer for more information (this is the Sibyl, Deiphobe, who appears in Book 6).
The Trojans sail close enough to see land—and another omen, four white horses, which presage war (537-43). They navigate through the Odyssey’s legendary monsters Scylla and Charybdis, as instructed by Helenus (555-68). On Sicily, under the volcanic Mount Etna, they meet a castaway Greek who was left behind by Odysseus when they escaped the Cyclops, another famous episode from the Odyssey. This man, named Achaemenides, admits he is a Greek but begs the Trojans to help him escape (612-18). Aeneas and his men agree and barely escape the Cyclops themselves.
Aeneas concludes his story to Dido and the Carthaginians by sharing that his beloved father, Anchises, had died at this point: “This was my hardest test, the decisive turn on a long road” (714-15).
Book 4 Summary
After Venus and Cupid’s interference in Book 2, Dido is infatuated with Aeneas. She tells her sister, Anna, that she wants to pursue a relationship with him but fears she would be betraying the memory of her deceased husband, Sychaeus (20-29). She promised to be faithful to him. Anna assures her that a romance with Aeneas would be good for Dido not only mentally, but also politically; they desperately need allies. She encourages Dido to delay Aeneas from leaving as much as possible (50-51). In an aside to the reader, Virgil indicates that Dido is mad with love and that Carthage’s progress comes to a standstill without her direction (65-73; 86-89).
Sensing grave danger for Dido and Carthage, Juno tries to persuade Venus that it would be best if they joined forces and encouraged Dido and Aeneas to marry and rule together, but Venus sees through the ruse. She wonders aloud if this is what the fates desire—both goddesses know Aeneas is fated to settle in Italy and marry the Italian princess Lavinia. Brushing Venus off, Juno plans for Aeneas and Dido to go on a hunt together. She will conjure a storm, driving the pair into a cave for shelter, where they will be “married”—that is, have sex. Venus agrees but laughs (128).
The hunt goes according to Juno’s plan, and Dido, completely smitten, loses any pretense of hiding her affair with Aeneas. Virgil describes how a female personification of Rumor flies through the city (173-95). Rival kings of local kingdoms are jealous and insulted that Dido has rejected them (196-220). One of these kings, Iarbas, convinces his father, Jupiter, to send Mercury, the messenger of the gods, to move Aeneas along, as he is: “Wasting time with no thought or respect for the cities that fate’s words / Grant him” (224-25).
Mercury chides Aeneas for forgetting his duty and laying foundations for Carthage, not Rome. Convinced, Aeneas orders his men to prepare for departure while he tries to find a way to tell Dido, but she figures out his plans before he can broach the subject (265-95). Alternately angry and sad, she begs him to stay, not only for the sake of their love, but also for her own sake, as she has isolated herself from the local chieftains by choosing him (314-24). Aeneas responds that he will miss her dearly, that he would stay with her if the fates and gods allowed it, and that they were never technically married (335-61). Dido explodes with anger. Aeneas, she argues, has rewarded her generosity and love with betrayal (373-75). She promises revenge and storms out. Aeneas is deeply upset by the encounter, but “[n]onetheless followed the gods’ commands” and continues preparing his ships (395-96).
Dido helplessly watches from the citadel. She convinces Anna to talk to Aeneas and ask him to stay until winter has ended and the sailing is favorable, at least, but Aeneas is impassive, though deeply anguished inside (435-49). Virgil compares Dido’s hopelessness to several famous figures in Greek tragedy (450-73). Dido lies to Anna, telling her she knows of a powerful witch who can kill her love for Aeneas if they build a pyre and burn his weapons upon it (478-98). She appeals to various deities and spirits associated with the Underworld—anyone “whose jurisdiction embraces all lovers with one-sided contracts” (521).
While everyone else is sleeping, Dido debates what to do and realizes how few options she has left (534-42). Meanwhile, Aeneas receives another vision resembling Mercury in a dream. It urges him to get out as soon as possible, as Dido is set on dying and possibly bringing him down with her (562-70). Aeneas obeys. When Dido sees the ships under way at dawn, she almost gives an order to attack them in a fit of insanity but holds back. If Aeneas is fated to be successful, she curses him to be always beset by war, particularly by the Carthaginians (607-29). Sending a nurse to fetch Anna, she prepares to complete the rites she had planned. Climbing the pyre, she stabs herself with Aeneas’s sword. Again, Rumor flies, and Carthage mourns. Cradled in Anna’s arms, Dido is dying but cannot die—this was not her fated time. Juno takes pity and sends the messenger goddess Iris to end her suffering (693-705).
Books 3-4 Analysis
Carrying on the Odyssean theme, Book 3 describes Aeneas’s wanderings about the Mediterranean. He meets many of the famous monsters Odysseus encountered, such as Scylla, Charybdis, and the Cyclops. However, while the Odyssey was a journey home for Odysseus, for Aeneas this is a journey into the unknown. He is often characterized by his ignorance of where he is or what he should do next, and it perhaps makes psychological sense that in these early books he looks not to the future—as he must—but the past. Book 3 sees him trying repeatedly (and unsuccessfully) to found cities in the wrong places. He even comes upon a dysfunctional Troy in miniature, built by Hector’s widow, Andromache. Luckily, “pious Aeneas” holds proper rituals and sacrifices in all these places and receives refined instructions from the gods clarifying where he should go. In opposition to Juno, supernatural forces like omens, ghosts, dreams, and oracles serve as agents of action in the Aeneid, driving Aeneas towards his goal when he falters. No matter how hard Juno protests, Jupiter’s word—Fate—will make itself known and guide him. With the end of Book 3, the narrative exits the past and reenters the present at Carthage.
Book 4, perhaps the most popular and widely read book of the Aeneid, centers on the tragedy of Dido. She was apparently Virgil’s own creation, and he looked to many literary and historical resources to construct her story. In being betrayed and left helpless in hostile territory by her lover, she most resembles the witch Medea, who was similarly divorced and betrayed by her husband Jason (as told in Apollonius of Rhodes’s Argonautica and Euripides’s Medea). Dido also resembles, as mentioned above, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. In the civil war between Octavian (later Augustus) and Marc Antony, Augustan propaganda portrayed Cleopatra as a dangerous Eastern seductress who nearly prevented Augustus from realizing his goal of a united Rome. Similarly, Virgil’s dangerous Eastern woman almost stops Aeneas from moving forward to Italy.
Virgil’s comparisons of Dido to these unsympathetic women do not mean Virgil is not sensitive to her. He focalizes much of Book 4 through Dido’s eyes; her speech and inner thoughts give insight into her struggle. Duped or manipulated by the gods (much as Aeneas is, throughout the poem), she truly believed that their tryst in the cave equated to marriage—and who could blame her, when Juno, the goddess of marriage, sanctioned it. Like Medea, Dido makes enemies by helping Aeneas (such as the king of a rival kingdom, Iarbas); though she burned all her bridges for him, he abandons her. She is overtaken by a madness of a different sort—love and desire—which is characterized much like the battle rage of men. Her reason is unseated; she is driven mad by love.
Whether Aeneas’s excuse for leaving her is justified is up for debate. His line is—as always—that the gods will it. It is certainly a painful separation for him, much as leaving his wife was in Book 2. In any case, Dido is uninterested in his excuses. She is possessed with an almost insensate rage and curses him (in words that should remind us of Juno). She wishes first that Aeneas be “hammered in war by the armies of valiant people” (615), foreshadowing his battles with the native Italians in Books 7 through 12. Finally, she promises eternal warfare between her people and his: “Rise from my bones, my avenger” (624), she says, referring to the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who will invade Rome and almost subjugate it in the Second Punic War.
Dido’s death is powered by a tone of deep pathos. She kills herself by falling on a sword, a masculine, heroic way to die. We learn, too, that this was not her fate; she must be put out of her misery by the gods. Her death in the prime of her life introduces a new, important theme of the work: the awful costs of building an empire. In the beginning of Book 5, Aeneas sees her pyre burning, but in a typical moment of ignorance, he does not know what it means. He will soon learn in Book 6, when he encounters Dido’s ghost in the Underworld.
