Love is a rather big part of human nature, everyone needs love and give other people love as well. Love plays a role in present day life sometimes distracting people of their needs and duties just as it did in the past which is illustrated in Virgil’s The Aeneid “Book IV: The Passion of the Queen” by Virgil is about Dido, Queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, a Trojan warrior, who begin to fall in love with each other. As this is happening, the god Mercury comes down to Aeneas and reminds him that he needs to focus on his main duties instead of Dido and leave for Italy. Virgil uses Aeneas’ decision to complete his duties and task given to him instead of staying with Queen Dido to show that love is an outside force that is acting upon humans.
Virgil’s first use of love as an outside force is depicted by using the Gods to bring Queen Dido and Aeneas together for the sake of love. To begin with, Virgil projected all Gods in Book IV as an outside force and it shows simply because of the little internal involvement on the Humans. Cupid, the God of love, desire, and attraction, ignited Dido’s …show more content…
As soon as Dido meets Aeneas, she abandons her responsibilities as Queen in order to spend time with Aeneas. In the Aeneid, Virgil portrays Queen Dido as an obsessed woman yearning for Aeneas’s affection when she lays her head on the couch to feel Aeneas’s presence after he leaves. In the text it states that Queen Dido, “...falls on the couch he has left. Though absent, each from each, she hears him, she sees him, or, captivated by his look of his father, she holds Ascanius on her lap, in case she may beguile a passion beyond all utterance. No longer rise the towers begun, no longer do the youth exercise in arms, or toil at havens or bulwarks for safety in war; the works are broken off and idle – great menacing walls and cranes that touch the sky.”
Virgil’s first use of love as an outside force is depicted by using the Gods to bring Queen Dido and Aeneas together for the sake of love. To begin with, Virgil projected all Gods in Book IV as an outside force and it shows simply because of the little internal involvement on the Humans. Cupid, the God of love, desire, and attraction, ignited Dido’s …show more content…
As soon as Dido meets Aeneas, she abandons her responsibilities as Queen in order to spend time with Aeneas. In the Aeneid, Virgil portrays Queen Dido as an obsessed woman yearning for Aeneas’s affection when she lays her head on the couch to feel Aeneas’s presence after he leaves. In the text it states that Queen Dido, “...falls on the couch he has left. Though absent, each from each, she hears him, she sees him, or, captivated by his look of his father, she holds Ascanius on her lap, in case she may beguile a passion beyond all utterance. No longer rise the towers begun, no longer do the youth exercise in arms, or toil at havens or bulwarks for safety in war; the works are broken off and idle – great menacing walls and cranes that touch the sky.”