Dido and the Impotentia Muliebris: the Disturbance of the Female Prototype in the Virgil's Aeneid

Abstract

Following the moral policies of Augustus, Virgil presents in his Aeneid two oppossing female prototypes, both related of the hero. First of all, Creusa, who has many of the virtues expected in the Roma wife. And Dido, who, although she had many of these virtues while she was married to the murdered Sichaeus, without a male relative to exercise the necesaary control over her, blind by the passion she feels for Aeneas, pushed by the words of the sister Anna, and dominated by impotentia, abandons the virtus that she tried to exercise as queen and experiences a progressive degradation as she is abandoned to the luxus to the point of choosing death as the only possibility of redemption. Her suicide will be the cause of hate between Rome and Carthage, and consequently, of the destruction of the african city, showing Virgil as well as moral decadence of woman can cause the decline and disappearance of a State.