Dido’s Tragedy

Dido’s Tragedy is a literary commentary, highly original in both form and content, on the Latin text of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 4, which concerns the love affair between Dido and Aeneas and its tragic denouement. A substantial introduction discusses the book’s historical and literary context and provides a detailed analysis of its connections with the genre of tragedy, the role of the supernatural, the characterization of Dido and Aeneas, and the nature and development of their relationship. For the commentary the Latin text is divided into manageable excerpts, each being accompanied by a translation and a bespoke literary essay; there is also an extensive bibliography. The literary essays examine points of interest in each excerpt and relate these to the themes highlighted in the introduction; frequent reference is made to other classical works, to relevant texts in the European literary tradition, to other Virgilian commentaries from Servius onwards, and to recent secondary literature on Dido, Virgil, and tragedy. Readers are provided with plenty of signposts to help them investigate questions that interest them. The text of Aeneid 4 contains some notorious interpretative cruces: the commentary discusses these problematic passages in detail, fitting them into an overall interpretation of the book and of the Aeneid as a whole.

Richard Gaskin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. He has taught and researched at the universities of Bonn, Mainz, Oxford, and Sussex. He specializes and has published widely in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, the history of philosophy, literary theory and criticism, classical literature, and the European literary tradition.