Who's side would you take?

In Book Four of The Aeneid, Queen Dido is argued to be misunderstood because she has a troubled heart. I, however, wholeheartedly believe that she was being down right crazy. First off, she does not even know if she should get into this “relationship” with Aeneas. This is understandable because she just lost her husband and Virgil made it seem like she was most definitely infatuated with him. The fact that she was so in love with him was sweet but at the same time, it supports the idea that she gets extremely attached. So, at first Dido was all caught up about her late husband, but her sister, Anna gave her a little pep talk that fired up Dido’s craziness. Anna was all like don’t waste your life away, you’re still so young, you deserve the gift of love, and so on. This is just the beginning of what I like to call, Dido’s love storm.

Since Anna got Dido all pumped up, Dido went through with seeing Aeneas. To my understanding, the feelings were mutual between the two. Aeneas was in love with Dido and vice versa. Yes, that is great and all but here comes Juno stirring up trouble because what else is she going to do? I never know what is going through Juno’s head but I imagine it is something like, “How can I mess up this person’s life today?” Juno does her little thing and makes it appear that Dido and Aeneas get married one day when they are all in the woods. However, both Aeneas and Dido knew that this was not a really marriage. Dido knew what it looked like, though, so she clung on to the fact that it appeared to be a real marriage. This supports my argument that Dido was more on the delusional side.

After all of this went down, Aeneas got a wake up call. He came to his senses and realized that this was not his fate and that he needed to continue on in his little journey. Aeneas had responsibilities and expectations that needed to be filled. Aeneas did not mean to fall in love with Dido, but he did. Aeneas understood, though, that he could not just drop all of his duties for one girl. Dido, however, completely disagreed with that. She literally went on a rampage and started telling off Aeneas and she made him out to be such a jerk. However, if you really look at the situation, they were together at the wrong time.  

In conclusion, Dido’s flare for the dramatic got the best of her. Yes, I understand that Venus added her little love magic on Dido but Dido really did go too far. She legit went crazy on Aeneas because she was not not his sole attention and would not drop everything for her. I felt bad for Aeneas because he fell in love with this girl, realized he still had things to do, then found out his girl was crazy. Dido went to the complete extreme and took her own life. The big question is how did that possibly solve anything? Dido’s love drove her to obsession and eventually death. Dido was unstable,yes, but she was too unstable for me to sympathize with her. Aeneas had responsibilities to fill and he understood he needed to be mature and official about it. I am upset that Dido died but I am glad Aeneas does not have to live with that anymore.