Similarities Between The Aeneid And Inferno

In both The Aeneid and Inferno, Queen Dido of Carthage is predestined to damnation. On the one hand, Virgil sees Dido as a notable queen who to her misfortune, becomes a puppet to the insatiable Gods . On the other hand, Dante Alighieri depicts Queen Dido as nothing but a treacherous creature. Within Dante’s Inferno, more importance is given to Dido’s lustful facet than to the fact that she commits suicide, and should therefore, be in the seventh circle of hell. Though Virgil and Alighieri existed in different time periods, both authors made queen Dido the embodiment of women as a whole: a representation of lust. In other words, queen Dido represents the notion that women are responsible for the fall of humankind. Because of her lust, Dido manages to sabotage her life by allowing sinful desire to take control of her mind, which in turn leads to the moral downfall of the masculine heroes. Author Elena Lombardi defines lechery as: “drunken thirst, a momentary outburst, eternal bitterness; it shuns the light, seeks darkness, and entirely plunders man’s mind” (Lombardi 54). If one concludes that lust is the “plundering of the mind,” it can be said that Dido commits acts that support said allegation. Not only is Dido’s mind controlled by desire, but she also breaks the vow she …show more content…
Not only is she allegedly responsible for allowing lust to control her, but she is also deemed responsible for Aeneas’ moral downfall. The fact that a mortal queen, a woman, is to blame for the negligence of a heroic, half-god man is not surprising. As queen Dido appears in book four, it can be easy to infer that she is responsible for delaying Aeneas’ journey. However, assuming that Dido is responsible for her actions and that she is to blame for distracting Aeneas, implies that womanhood, or in this case queen Dido, is by definition a symbol of