But Venus anxious for her son's fate

Invokes wily Cupid [1] of the mate

To assume sweet Ascanius’ form

Her fear of Juno’s queen [2] sworn

To Winged Love she whispered

As he donned winged slippers

.

My son my strength whose might alone

Keeps Thunder on his awful throne [3]

My Father Almighty’s wife

Threatens Aeneas’ life

I suspect the city where Juno reigns

Dido for Aeneas affection feigns

You must pervert her womanly art

Fire with love her proud Tyrian heart

As Ascanius ink you venom pure

To afflict a love blind and sure

.

Venus to Ascanius flies

Seals with sleep his young eyes

Lulled in her lap amidst love

Born to a sacred grove above

With myrtle crowns his head

Softly lays him on a flowery bed [4]

.

Cupid his form and face [5]

Following Achates with a shorter pace

And brought the gifts to the queen

Seated among the lordly guests

High on a golden bed at rest

Breads are heaped on high

Slaves water and towels supply [6]

Fifty slave maids in dainty file bore

Fuming censers the gods adore

A hundred youths and virgins

Wine bowls and plates their burden

The Tyrian chiefs admitted to the feast

Recline on the painted couches

On the Trojan gifts with wonder gaze

And regard Ascanius with more amaze

His rosy cheeks his radiant eyes

His every feature the god’s disguise

Far above the rest, the royal dame

Doomed to love's disastrous flame

With wild eyes loving the youth

Unsuspecting a divine ruse

.

The lying god on Aeneas’ arm

Soon sought the queen

The evil so close to her breast

Her heart could not have guessed

The dead to the living as love resigned

And all that is Aeneas enchants her mind

End 22

Notes

The importance of the feminine, as extolled by Virgil, personal poet of the father of Rome, Augustus Caesar, in what amounts to the approved ancestral legendry of a nation who defined virtue as explicitly masculine may not be lightly regarded. Something echoes here in the heart of this tale that brings Dido to the for as the temporal woman at the mercy of the eternally feminine aspect of divinity vested in the ideal of Venus, as love personified as both a comfort and a hurt.  

-1. Winged Love, in the form of Cupid, held a role similar and subservient to Nike or Winged Victory in the service of Pallas Athene.

-2. Dido’s patron was Juno, mother god, who also cursed Troy. This reader takes this dichotomous metaphysic bitch feud as reflective of the cultural tension implicit in the nomad Arуan astral regard for the feminine uncomfortably conjoined with the sacral agrarian supplication to Mother Earth.

-3. Cupid is explicitly the power of feminine approval and affection to stay the hand of war-wielding man.

-4. Suggests the paradise experienced in dream as a reward for earthly service employed by certain cults through modern times to insure devotion from the envoy of political murder.

-5. Cupidity

-6. Ancient life does not conduct, does not proceed or precede without slaves.