91�����

 

�Queen Dido and the Ivory Gate�

 

by Dr. Joseph Hattrup (�01)
Tutor
91����� Aquinas College, California
Tutor Talk
September 30, 2026

 

Introduction

Half-way through Virgil�s Aeneid (book-wise, if not line-wise[1]), we hear the following:

There are two gates of Sleep, one said to be
of horn, whereby the true shades pass with ease,
The other all white ivory agleam
Without a flaw, and yet false dreams are sent
Through this one by the ghosts to the upper world.
Anchises now, his last instructions given,
Took son and Sibyl there and let them go
By the Ivory Gate. Aeneas made his way
Straight to the ships to see his crews again,
Then sailed directly to Caieta�s port.
Bow anchors out, the sterns rest on the beach.[2]
 

This is the very end of Book 6, out of 12 total books. Notoriously, Aeneas�s father, Anchises, immediately after showing his son the future glory of Rome, his son, who is to be the founder of that great new cosmic world entity, which, according to Jupiter�s prophecy, is to have no limits either in space or in time[3], sends him back from the Underworld into the world of the living through the gate of false dreams. 

Why? Does this sending imply that all that Aeneas has seen of the glory of Rome is to be only a false dream? It is a deep, uncomfortable tension felt by every reader of the Aeneid, and, at a crucial moment in the tale, when Aeneas is finally about to settle in Italy and begin the work of accomplishing his high destiny.

Let�s set the stage a little bit. The gates of horn and ivory appear in Homer�s Odyssey. In Book 19, when Penelope is questioning the beggar who has just that day come to her house to see whether he knows anything of the whereabouts of her husband, Odysseus, she reports to him a dream she had had:

But come, listen to a dream of mine and interpret it for me.
I have twenty geese here about the house, and they feed on
grains of wheat from the water trough. I love to watch them.
But a great eagle with crooked beak came down from the mountain,
and broke the necks of them all and killed them. So the whole twenty
lay dead about the house, but he soared high in the bright air.
Then I began to weep�that was in my dream�and cried out
aloud, and around me gathered the fair-haired Achaian women
as I cried out sorrowing for my geese killed by the eagle.
But he came back again and perched on the jut of the gabled
roof. He now had a human voice and spoke aloud to me:
�Do not fear, O daughter of far-famed Ikarios.
This is no dream, but a blessing real as day. You will see it
done. The geese are the suitors, and I, the eagle, have been
a bird of portent, but now I am your own husband, come home,
and I shall inflict shameless destruction on all the suitors.�[4]
 

Odysseus assures her that the dream assuredly means that the suitors will all come to death and destruction. But Penelope replies:

My friend, dreams are things hard to interpret, hopeless to puzzle
out, and people find that not all of them end in anything.
There are two gates through which the insubstantial dreams issue.
One pair of gates is made of horn, and one of ivory.
Those of the dreams which issue through the gate of sawn ivory,
these are deceptive dreams, their message is never accomplished.
But those that come into the open through the gates of the polished
horn accomplish the truth for any mortal who sees them.
I do not think that this strange dream that I had came to me
through this gate. My son and I would be glad if it did so.[5]
 

So it seems clear that this is the difference between the gates of horn and ivory: through the gate of horn come dreams that are true and that men can trust; but through the gate of ivory pass deceptive dreams whose messages are never accomplished.

Is this the fate of Aeneas? That he brings a message, a good news, that will never be accomplished?

What is the message, brought forth by this dream-man from Elysium? It has many parts, but perhaps the most glamorous are the message that there will be a man called Caesar Augustus who will once again bring a golden age to Latium[6], and also the exhortation to exercise the arts of justice and peace: �Roman: remember by your strength to rule Earth�s peoples � for your arts are to be these: To pacify, to impose the rule of law, To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.�[7] The implication is that this exhortation will be obeyed. But not all of Anchises� exhortations will be obeyed, as we will see.

My thesis is that the dream brought forth with Aeneas from the Underworld, a dream that is partly vision, partly spoken message, but mostly the man himself, the man who is now a Roman, is not substantially false. That is, the Rome and the Romans foretold by Anchises will actually come to be. However, neither is it simply true. It bears a perilous falseness about it that might be characterized as a sort of spiritual amnesia. Virgil is deeply concerned about this spiritual amnesia, and he wants to body it forth for us in Aeneas so that we can see it and take it to heart. Aeneas is, for us, a dream, an image, a shadow from the Underworld that we must carefully interpret. The key to this interpretation in the Aeneid itself is the casualty Aeneas has left behind in North Africa: Queen Dido of Carthage.

 

Part 1: The Golden Bough

I want to try to reconstruct the context of Aeneas�s visit to Anchises in Elysium in terms of Aeneas�s relations with Queen Dido because I think that she provides us with the primary emotional canvas on which the future Romans and their actions are painted. Book 6, in which the Underworld sequence takes place, regularly and deliberately recreates scenes from Book 4 in which Dido meets her end. I want to focus on two images, namely, the funeral of Misenus and the plucking of the golden bough, which amounts to Aeneas�s ritual passport to Elysium.

Let�s start with the golden bough. After Aeneas has received the Sibyl�s prophecy concerning the challenges he will face in Italy, he requests of her that she show him the way to Anchises in the Underworld, in keeping with the plea of Anchises himself received in a vision in Sicily. The Sibyl answers this request by explaining the rite in accordance with which Aeneas will enter the Underworld in such a way that he might leave it again. As she says,

Offspring of gods by blood, Trojan Anchises� son,
The way downward is easy from Avernus.
Black Dis�s door stands open night and day.
But to retrace your steps to heaven�s air,
There is the trouble, there is the toil.[8]
 

Then she goes on to explain the rite:

If you feel such love,
And such desire to cross the Stygian water
Twice, to view the night of Tartarus twice� 
If this mad effort�s to your liking, then 
Consider what you must accomplish first. 
A tree�s deep shade conceals a bough whose leaves 
And pliant twigs are all of gold, a thing 
Sacred to Juno of the lower world. 
The whole grove shelters it, and thickest shade 
In dusky valleys shuts it in. And yet 
No one may enter hidden depths 
Below the earth unless he picks this bough, 
The tree�s fruit, with its foliage of gold. 
Proserpina decreed this bough, as due her, 
Should be given into her own fair hands 
When torn away. In place of it a second 
Grows up without fail, all gold as well, 
Flowering with metallic leaves again. 
So lift your eyes and search, and once you find it 
Pull away the bough. It will come willingly, 
Easily, if you are called by fate. 
If not, with all your strength you cannot conquer it, 
Cannot lop it off with a sword�s edge.[9]
 

There are many curious things about this speech, but I want to point out three of them. First, the branch of which the Sibyl speaks she describes as �golden-haired.� In Fitzgerald�s translation, which I have just quoted, the Sibyl says, �And yet no one may enter hidden depths below the earth unless he picks this bough, the tree�s fruit, with its foliage of gold.� The expression he translates as �foliage of gold� is �auricomos fetus,� literally, a �golden-haired growth.�[10] Auricomus can refer either to hair or foliage, but it is very interesting to notice the implication of golden hair in the passage. So that is the first point. The second is that the Sibyl says that the bough will come willingly, if Aeneas is fated to have it: �Namque ipse volens facilisque sequetur, si te fata vocant.�[11] I think it is worthy of note that the Sibyl seems to attribute the will to the branch itself. She describes it as volens, willing. The third and final point is that the branch is to be an offering to Proserpina for passage into Elysium.

 Now let�s look at Dido�s death scene in Book 4. Permit me to quote at a little length, beginning with Anna, Dido�s sister, climbing the pyre:

Now she had climbed 
The topmost steps and took her dying sister 
Into her arms to cherish, with a sob, 
Using her dress to stanch the dark blood flow. 
But Dido trying to lift her heavy eyes 
Fainted again. Her chest-wound whistled air. 
Three times she struggled up on one elbow 
And each time fell back on the bed. Her gaze 
Went wavering as she looked for heaven�s light 
And groaned at finding it. Almighty Juno, 
Filled with pity for this long ordeal 
And difficult passage, now sent Iris down 
Out of Olympus to set free 
The wrestling spirit from the body�s hold. 
For since she died, not at her fated span 
Nor as she merited, but before her time 
Enflamed and driven mad, Proserpina 
Had not yet plucked from her the golden hair, 
Delivering her to Orcus of the Styx. 
So humid Iris through bright heaven flew 
On saffron-yellow wings, and in her train 
A thousand hues shimmered before the sun. 
At Dido�s head she came to rest. �This token 
Sacred to Dis I bear away as bidden 
And free you from your body.� Saying this, 
She cut a lock of hair. Along with it 
Her body�s warmth fell into dissolution, 
And out into the winds her life withdrew.[12]
 

There are points in this passage to which the points we noticed in the passage from Book 6 seem to respond. First, a lock of golden hair is cut from Dido�s head as a condition for the passage of her life from her body into death. Second, this lock is sacred to Proserpina. Third, her life�s endeavor to escape from her body meets resistance until the lock is cut.

So, the first thing I want to emphasize is the deliberate likeness between the golden bough and the lock of Dido�s hair. From this we can gather that the rite in accordance with which Aeneas enters the Underworld is like Dido�s, and it ought to remind us of her. Her dying body should be in our imaginations as Aeneas is reaching out to grasp the golden bough, along with the chest-wound, the iron sword that inflicted it, and the wrestling of the spirit with the limbs of the body. But the other thing I want to emphasize is the interplay between willingness and unwillingness associated with the rite in the two passages. Dido�s life wrestles with her body in its endeavor to escape. 

This experience ought to remind us of Aeneas� experience when he goes to take the golden bough. He follows the doves sent by Venus during the preparations for Misenus� funeral to the Ilex tree near the lake of Avernus. The poet describes the scene:

Then he stood still to see 
What signs the doves might give, or where their flight 
Might lead him. And they fed, and then flew on, 
Each time as far as one who came behind 
Could keep in view. Then when they reached the gorge 
Of sulphurous Avernus, first borne upward 
Through the lucent air, they glided down 
To their desired rest, the two-hued tree 
Where glitter of gold filtered between green boughs. 
Like mistletoe that in the woods in winter 
Thrives with yellowish berries and new leaves� 
A parasite on the trunk it twines around�
So bright amid the dark green ilex shone 
The golden leafage, rustling in light wind. 
Aeneas at once briskly took hold of it 
And, though it clung, greedily broke it off, 
Then carried it to the Sibyl�s cave.[13]
 

Every detail in this picture is important and deliberately painted into it by Virgil: for example, that the bough is growing on a host tree distinct in species from it; that the host tree is an ilex tree; that the bough is compared to mistletoe growing in the wintertime. But let�s focus on two things. First, let�s recall that the plucking of the bough is the condition by which Aeneas will be granted entry to the place of the dead. So right away we have a comparison with Dido. 

Second, as has often been noted, the branch resists Aeneas�s plucking of it. It does not seem to be willing, as the Sibyl had said it would be. This fact actually makes Aeneas� experience feel more like Dido�s death than it would have if things had gone according to the Sibyl�s description, since resistance is encountered, rather than a clear willingness. 

However, there is an important contrast. Dido�s death, and consequently, the plucking of her hair by Juno via Iris, have been described as not by fate: �For since she died, not at her fated span nor as she merited, but before her time enflamed and driven mad, Proserpina had not yet plucked from her the golden hair, delivering her to Orcus of the Styx.� However, Aeneas� plucking of the bough is positively by fate. Again, the Sibyl had said: �So lift your eyes and search, and once you find it pull away the bough. It will come willingly, easily, if you are called by fate. If not, with all your strength you cannot conquer it, cannot lop it off with a sword�s edge.� 

Now, someone might argue that the fact that it came not willingly but with resistance, is a sign that Aeneas� progress at this juncture is not in accord with fate, but I think we need to take very seriously the Sibyl�s claim that if the bearer is not called by fate there is no way the branch will be his. Something more subtle is going on here. The branch is described as �cunctans,� or �hesitating.� One wonders, why, if in obedience to the laws of fate the branch did yield to Aeneas�s hand, did it first hesitate? This is the point I want to focus on moving forward in thinking about the meaning of the Ivory Gate.

 

Part 2: The Funeral of Misenus

The Sibyl announces to Aeneas, immediately after she has told him of the golden bough, that a member of his crew is dead and polluting the fleet and that he must perform this man�s funeral before he can himself approach the gate of Avernus:

She fell silent, 
Closing her lips. With downcast face and eyes 
Aeneas turned from the cavern to the shore, 
Dark matters on his mind. Steadfast Achatës 
Walked beside him with deliberate pace 
And equal anxieties. The two exchanged 
In shifting conversation many guesses 
As to that friend, now dead, now to be buried, 
So the prophetess had said�then suddenly 
As they came down to the dry beach they saw 
Misenus, robbed of life by early death, 
Their own Misenus, a son of Aeolus, 
Never surpassed at rousing fighting men 
With brazen trumpet, setting Mars afire. 
Once he had been great Hector�s adjutant, 
Going forward at Hector�s side in battle, 
Brilliant with trumpet and with spear as well. 
After Achilles took the life of Hector, 
This gallant soldier joined Dardan Aeneas 
In allegiance to no lesser cause. That day 
By chance, as he blew notes on a hollow shell, 
Making the sea sing back, in his wild folly 
He dared the gods to rival him. Then Triton, 
Envious, if this can be believed, 
Caught him and put him under in the surf 
Amid the rocks off shore.[14]
 

So Aeneas goes to bury his former friend and the herald of Hector. But Virgil�s description of the preparations for the funeral is truly astonishing:

All who were there 
Clamored around the body in lament, 
Aeneas, the good captain, most of all. 
In haste then, even as they wept, they turned 
To carry out the orders of the Sibyl, 
Racing to pile up logs for the altar-pyre 
And build it sky-high. Into the virgin forest, 
Thicket of wild things, went the men, and down 
The pitch pines came, the bitten ilex rang 
With axe blows, ash and oak were split with wedges, 
Mighty rowans were trundled down the slopes. 
Aeneas himself went first in all this labor, 
Cheering his fellows on, with implements 
Like theirs in hand; but grimly in his heart 
He wondered, studying the unmeasured forest, 
And fell to prayer: �If only the golden bough 
Might shine for us in such a wilderness! 
As all the prophetess foretold was true� 
Misenus, in your case only too true.�[15]
 

Now listen to the description that Dido herself gives of her own pyre to her sister Anna in Book 4:

�Sister, be glad for me! I�ve found a way 
To bring him back or free me of desire. 
Near to the Ocean boundary, near sundown, 
The Aethiops� farthest territory lies, 
Where giant Atlas turns the sphere of heaven 
Studded with burning stars. From there 
A priestess of Massylian stock has come; 
She had been pointed out to me: custodian 
Of that shrine named for daughters of the west, 
Hesperidës; and it is she who fed 
The dragon, guarding well the holy boughs 
With honey dripping slow and drowsy poppy. 
Chanting her spells she undertakes to free 
What hearts she wills, but to inflict on others 
Duress of sad desires; to arrest 
The flow of rivers, make the stars move backward, 
Call up the spirits of deep Night. You�ll see 
Earth shift and rumble underfoot and ash trees 
Walk down mountainsides. Dearest, I swear 
Before the gods and by your own sweet self, 
It is against my will that I resort 
For weaponry to magic powers. In secret 
Build up a pyre in the inner court 
Under the open sky, and place upon it 
The arms that faithless man left in my chamber, 
All his clothing, and the marriage bed 
On which I came to grief�solace for me 
To annihilate all vestige of the man, 
Vile as he is: my priestess shows me this.� 
While she was speaking, cheek and brow grew pale. 
But Anna could not think her sister cloaked 
A suicide in these unheard-of rites; 
She failed to see how great her madness was 
And feared no consequence more grave 
Than at Sychaeus� death. So, as commanded, 
She made the preparations. For her part, 
The queen, seeing the pyre in her inmost court 
Erected huge with pitch-pine and sawn ilex, 
Hung all the place under the sky with wreaths 
And crowned it with funereal cypress boughs.
On the pyre�s top she put a sword he left
With clothing, and an effigy on a couch,
Her mind fixed now ahead on what would come.[16]
 

In both of these accounts we have pyres of pitch-pine and ilex, and we have ash trees rumbling down mountain sides. Dido�s account is a magical one. The ash trees �walk� down the mountain side at the command of a priestess-witch. In the Book 6 account we have the actual physical labor of felling the trees and carrying them down. Dido�s account is so vivid that when we encounter the same images again in Book 6 we can�t help but think of her and her pyre. So throughout this sequence of the funeral and the finding and plucking of the bough, Dido is right before our mind�s eye. The difference is that in Book 6 Aeneas himself is present at the heart of the labor, whereas in Book 4 he was absent. Only his effigy is present. And whereas in Book 4 Aeneas was absent and wholly ignorant of events when Dido�s lock is cut by Iris and her life recedes from her body into the winds, Aeneas himself is about to pluck the �golden-haired growth� from the ilex tree and descend into the Underworld.

 

Part 3: Dido in the Fields of Mourning

After Charon has ferried Aeneas across the river he comes into the Fields of Mourning. Here our memories of Dido suddenly become sensitive presence, because she stands before us. Aeneas meets her almost immediately. Her memory has been forced upon us by the woods surrounding Avernus Lake, and, now, there she is. Aeneas is on his way to Elysium to receive from his father Anchises the vision of the future Romans. But before he can get there, he must face Dido again. Their interaction is remarkable. Aeneas again insists that he had left Dido against his will, that he had left at the gods� commands, and he even adds this time that it is at the gods� commands that he is now driven through this world of ghosts. But Dido is completely unmoved by these appeals. She never acknowledges the justice of his claims but flees from him forever. There are a few details worthy of note. First, Dido�s sword-wound is still fresh and visible. Second, Aeneas is holding his sword and the golden bough, the golden lock of hair. Third, Aeneas in speaking to Dido has sworn by whatever faith, whatever fides, exists in the Underworld. In this connection, it is of interest that Dido, in her initial complaint to Aeneas in Book 4, had declared that Aeneas had committed a breach of faith, and that faith could never again be secure. 

What has just happened? Aeneas is fulfilling his mission, his piety. But Dido is an irreducible casualty along the way. He cannot simply incorporate her into the grand vision of Roman glory to come. She remains and is a tragedy. This reality will be repeated in Aeneas� own story and in the vision itself of Roman greatness. I want to argue that this is a principal aspect of the Ivory Gate.

In Aeneas� own story, Turnus and Camilla are further examples of this: beautiful young people who must die tragically leaving behind goods that are simply losses, goods that cannot be incorporated into Rome. There is a grave danger here to Rome itself, a danger to memory, a danger that Virgil is fighting against through poetry, a danger that, I suspect, Anchises sees clearly but that Aeneas must learn about through his own experience. In the Aeneid, the focus of this danger is in the person of Dido.

Let�s consider a few points from the vision of the Romans Anchises bestows on Aeneas: Anchises describes it as a vision of glory and a vision of fate. He is chiefly trying to impress upon Aeneas the greatness of the Roman state and of the Roman mission. But, again, it is punctuated with tragedy.

First, we get:

Turn your two eyes
This way and see this people, your own Romans.
Here is Caesar, and all the line of Iulus,
All who shall one day pass under the dome
Of the great sky: this is the man, this one,
Of whom so often you have heard the promise,
Caesar Augustus, son of the deified,
Who shall bring once again an Age of Gold
To Latium, to the land where Saturn reigned
In early times. He will extend his power
Beyond the Garamants and Indians,
Over far territories north and south
Of the zodiacal stars, the solar way,
Where Atlas, heaven-bearing, on his shoulder
Turns the night-sphere, studded with burning stars.[17]
 

The emperor Augustus is described as one who will bring world-wide peace, established in justice, through a divine influence in which he shares and which he wields. In this context he is described as the son of the deified one, divi genus. This is, of course, Julius Caesar, in whom Anchises takes a great interest because he is his own descendant. Julius Caesar will be Aeneas� son through his own son, Iulus, from whom the Julian family will receive their name.

But the plot thickens. A few lines later we get:

That pair, however, matched in brilliant armor, 
Matched in their hearts� desire now, while night 
Still holds them fast, once they attain life�s light 
What war, what grief, will they provoke between them� 
Battle-lines and bloodshed�as the father 
Marches from the Alpine ramparts, down 
From Monaco�s walled height, and the son-in-law, 
Drawn up with armies of the East, awaits him. 
Sons, refrain! You must not blind your hearts 
To that enormity of civil war, 
Turning against your country�s very heart 
Her own vigor of manhood. You above all 
Who trace your line from the immortals, you 
Be first to spare us. Child of my own blood, 
Throw away your sword![18]
 

As far as I can see, this passage is universally understood to refer to Caesar and Pompey, and Anchises again addresses Caesar as his own son and as a son of immortal gods. He loudly condemns the civil war precipitated by these men, and he directs a command to Caesar himself: �s�貹����!�  Within a few lines of this command he then states the famous vocation of Rome:

Roman, remember by your strength to rule
Earth�s peoples � for your arts are to be these:
To pacify, to impose the rule of law
To spare the conquered, battle down the proud.[19]
 

What is Anchises command in these lines? It is, remember.

There is a kind of holy memory being described in this sequence. Rome has a high calling, a vocation, a fate. The foundations of the common good are at stake, world-wide justice and peace. Yet, the temptations of power and pride are constantly present, the temptation to make the common possession of Rome a private possession unto personal glory at Rome�s expense. More pertinent to the Aeneid itself, perhaps are the temptations to lust and anger, which Virgil calls in common, fury. Fury exercised in pursuit of the goals of cosmic vocation can and does leave a wake of death and destruction behind it, death that was perhaps a casualty of fate, not demanded by it. Dido is, for Virgil in the Aeneid, the prime example of this, the primary focus of this kind of attention. Again, as I have suggested, Camilla and Turnus are other very primary examples. And there are many others.

So, what about the Ivory Gate? When Aeneas first meets Anchises in Elysium, we are told:

Aeneas said: �Your ghost,
Your sad ghost, father, often before my mind,
Impelled me to the threshold of this place.
My ships ride anchored in the Tuscan sea.
But let me have your hand, let me embrace you,
Do not draw back.� At this his tears brimmed over
And down his cheeks. And there he tried three times
To throw his arms around his father�s neck,
Three times the shade untouched slipped through his hands,
Weightless and fugitive as dream.[20]
 

The word translated as �ghost� is imago, and dream is somnus. Anchises is himself, to Aeneas, an image. After his viewing of the future Romans Aeneas is an image-bearer. In this sense he is himself a kind of image or dream, an image or dream of the future. His future actions, crucially, will depend on how he carries this image and weighs it against others, such as the images on the shield bestowed on him by Vulcan and Venus, and the image traced in gold on the belt of Pallas.

Anchises sends Aeneas out through the gate of false dreams. What is false about it? Perhaps it is a particular way of carrying images. And there is perhaps no more urgent question for the reader of Book 6 than this: �What kind of image-bearer is Augustus Caesar?� Is he the kind of image-bearer who will keep a clear memory of the suffering that has been inflicted by Rome on the youthful and beautiful in the world in quest of its vocation? Or will he be the kind who remembers its power only? Can he really bring about a profound world-wide peace based on real righteousness, not influenced by fury? Or will he forget what fury has already accomplished in the inmost viscera of Rome and sink it to new depths of civil conflict? Dido is a powerful reminder.

With regard to these questions Virgil may want us to have the words of Penelope in mind at this moment, as Aeneas passes back into the world of life, breath, and blood: �I do not think that this strange dream that I had came to me through this gate. But my son and I would be glad if it did so.�