Dux femina facti : Women wielding power in Vergil’s Aeneid

Abstract

This study examines female agency in the Aeneid to determine to what extent women are characterized as strategists. Since this study discusses the political agency of women, the emphasis is on the elite, non-divine women in the Aeneid, who also seem to count amongst the primary plot drivers in this epic.1 The focus will therefore be on Dido, Anna, Camilla, and Amata. The effectiveness of their strategizing is also examined, i.e., to what extent their decisions affected the course of events. In the public sphere of patriarchal Augustan Rome, one finds that women and their political activity were largely relegated to the background. Certain aristocratic women were able to play political roles (Maclachlan, 2013:85), but political participation per se was an activity that was deemed to be reserved exclusively for men. Women were expected to concern themselves with domestic matters and to bear children – all to realize male success. Even the aristocratic women, who partook in high politics (Pomeroy, 1995:149), were expected to act according to the domestically orientated life that the Augustan ideology prescribed. Yet, the Aeneid, Rome’s national epic, puts a number of politically active women in the foreground of the narrative. Even domestic matters, such as bearing children, seem to be described in terms of assets for their own gain, not only for that of their husbands. The political activity portrayed in the Aeneid does not seem to portray politics in terms of activities reserved for men but in terms of activities that are equally performed by women. An extensive comparison of female political activity in the Aeneid and historic female political activity is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but certain historical figures and events are referred to and compared to their literary Vergilian counterparts where necessary. The characterization of the women in the Aeneid includes the dialogues that take place amongst the elite non-divine female characters who are also portrayed in the epic as plot drivers in their own right. Their attributes that are revealed through indirect discourse or dialogue with other characters will also be considered. The sections in the Aeneid where women converse with other women reveal that the female mind is, in fact, not occupied primarily with either domestic trifles or men, but rather with their own political ambitions. This especially pertains to securing the survival of their lineage to preserve their honour and to realize their own glory.