Aeneid Book 4, lines 685 - 705

Dido’s release

by Virgil

Death does not come quickly to Dido – she lingers in pain after stabbing herself with Aeneas’s sword. We are spared none of the details, as her sister, Anna, climbs to her on her pyre. Finally, Juno sends Iris, Goddess of the rainbow and Mercury’s female counterpart as messenger of the Gods, to release her. References to the cutting of a tress are to the practice of cutting hairs from the brows of sacrificial animals.

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Sic fata gradus evaserat altos,
semianimemque sinu germanam amplexa fovebat
cum gemitu atque atros siccabat veste cruores.
illa gravis oculos conata attollere rursus
deficit; infixum stridit sub pectore vulnus.
ter sese attollens cubitoque adnixa levavit,
ter revoluta toro est oculisque errantibus alto
quaesivit caelo lucem ingemuitque reperta.
Tum Iuno omnipotens longum miserata dolorem
difficilisque obitus Irim demisit Olympo
quae luctantem animam nexosque resolveret artus.
nam quia nec fato merita nec morte peribat,
sed misera ante diem subitoque accensa furore,
nondum illi flavum Proserpina vertice crinem
abstulerat Stygioque caput damnaverat Orco.
ergo Iris croceis per caelum roscida pennis
mille trahens varios adverso sole colores
devolat et supra caput astitit. ‘hunc ego Diti
sacrum iussa fero teque isto corpore solvo’:
sic ait et dextra crinem secat, omnis et una
dilapsus calor atque in ventos vita recessit.

She mounted the steep slope, hugged and cradled
her dying sister, wailing, and dried
the black gore with her dress. Dido tried
to raise her heavy eyes, but fell back;
breath rattled from her deep chest wound.
Three times she raised herself on her elbow,
Three times fell back to the couch, looked with vague eyes
up for light in the heavens, groaning when she found it.
Then mighty Juno took pity on her long agony and
painful passing and sent down Iris from Olympus
to free her struggling spirit from the  limbs that clung to it.
Because her death was neither fated nor deserved,
but grim, premature and in a sudden fit of frenzy,
Proserpina had not taken the golden tress of hair from
her head and sealed her for Styx and the underworld.
Fresh with dew, Iris flew down through the sky on saffron
wings, trailing a thousand colours against the sun,
and paused above her head. “As bidden, I take this,
sacred to Pluto, and free you from this your body”
she said, and with her right hand cut the tress: at once
all warmth was vanished, her spirit gone to the winds.

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More Poems by Virgil

  1. The death of Euryalus and Nisus
  2. King Latinus grants the Trojans’ request
  3. Aeneas sees Marcellus, Augustus’s tragic heir
  4. Aeneas is wounded
  5. Juno is reconciled
  6. Anchises’s ghost invites Aeneas to visit the underworld
  7. Storm at sea!
  8. The portals of sleep
  9. Aeneas’s oath
  10. Charon, the ferryman
  11. Dido and Aeneas: Hell hath no fury …
  12. Dido and Aeneas: royal hunt and royal affair
  13. Virgil begins the Georgics
  14. Virgil’s poetic temple to Caesar
  15. Aeneas arrives in Italy
  16. Mercury’s journey to Carthage
  17. Jupiter’s prophecy
  18. Sea-nymphs
  19. The Trojan Horse enters the city
  20. The death of Dido.
  21. Signs of bad weather
  22. How Aeneas will know the site of his city
  23. The death of Priam
  24. Turnus at bay
  25. The journey to Hades begins
  26. The Aeneid begins
  27. Juno throws open the gates of war
  28. Rites for the allies’ dead
  29. Aristaeus’s bees
  30. Vulcan’s forge
  31. Virgil predicts a forthcoming birth and a new golden age
  32. Virgil’s perils on the sea
  33. Aeneas joins the fray
  34. Aeneas comes to the Hell of Tartarus
  35. The death of Pallas
  36. In King Latinus’s hall
  37. The Trojans prepare to set sail from Carthage
  38. Omens for Princess Lavinia
  39. Turnus is lured away from battle
  40. Turnus the wolf
  41. The farmer’s starry calendar
  42. Palinurus the helmsman is lost
  43. The Harpy’s prophecy
  44. King Mezentius meets his match
  45. Dido falls in love
  46. Aeneas saves his son and father, but at a cost
  47. The Trojans reach Carthage
  48. Mourning for Pallas
  49. Souls awaiting punishment in Tartarus, and the crimes that brought them there.
  50. The farmer’s happy lot
  51. Aeneas tours the site of Rome
  52. Aeneas finds Dido among the shades
  53. Aeneas’s vision of Augustus
  54. Catastrophe for Rome?
  55. The Fury Allecto blows the alarm
  56. Aeneas prepares to tell Dido his story
  57. A Fury rouses Turnus to war
  58. Laocoon warns against the Trojan horse
  59. Juno’s anger
  60. Aeneas and Dido meet
  61. Fire strikes Aeneas’s fleet
  62. The natural history of bees
  63. Laocoon and the snakes
  64. Aeneas learns the way to the underworld
  65. The infant Camilla
  66. More from Virgil’s farming Utopia
  67. Love is the same for all
  68. Aeneas rescues his Father Anchises
  69. The Syrian hostess
  70. Hector visits Aeneas in a dream
  71. Aeneas reaches the Elysian Fields
  72. Aeneas’s ships are transformed
  73. New allies for Aeneas
  74. Help for Father Aeneas from Father Tiber
  75. Rumour
  76. Dido’s story