An (Academic) Review of Claire Heywood’s The Wandering Queen

This past summer, I was working on the final edits of a chapter I am writing for a forthcoming book on the figure of Dido. My chapter is on modern adaptations of Dido, and as I was taking a well needed Instagram break when I saw a post about a newly announced book by Claire Heywood, titled The Wandering Queen. And I knew immediately it was about Dido.

If you know me well, you know I love Dido. Her famous description, dux femina facti (“woman leader of the deed,” Aen. 1.364), is my handle on every social media platform. I even have dux femina facti tattooed on my collarbone. So of course I was excited, but also sad, because the book would not come out in time for my chapter literally on modern adaptations of Dido. The chapter was due the next day, already extended by a month, so even if I could somehow get early access, I could not ask for any more time.

But that didn’t stop me.

I shot my shot, and DMed the author on Instagram. I explained that I was a scholar of Augustan literature, working on a chapter on adapting Dido for a modern audience, and unfortunately even if she could get me early access, I wouldn’t be able to incorporate her book into my chapter, but I was really interested, both as a fan of her work and also as a scholar, in seeing how she works with the story.

She responded that she’d see what she could do, and a few days later, said her publishers gave her permission to send me an early, pdf copy, so long as I didn’t share it. So I have had access to this book since July. Unfortunately, a trip to Italy for a conference, prep for the upcoming semester, and one of the more challenging teaching semesters have ever had got in the way, and I did not have the chance to read it.

Until I saw that it was available on NetGalley, a website where readers can request Advanced Reading Copies (ARCs) of books, for free, in exchange for a review. I was so appreciative of Claire Heywood’s generosity in sending me her book early that I decided I would request the ARC and not only review it on Goodreads, but also here, on my slightly dormant blog.

I can’t go too much into detail about the “Adapting Dido for a Modern Audience” chapter, as it will soon be under copyright, but I do want to situate Heywood’s adaptation among the others I have read, and specifically discuss how she handles the problem of making Dido marketable to modern readers.

Dido is an incredibly powerful mytho-historical figure. As the story goes, she was royalty from Tyre who, after her brother usurped her throne and killed her husband, fled with a group of refugees to found a city in Northern Africa. When they land, the locals say that she can only have as much land as she can cover with a cowhide. So Dido devises a trick, cuts the cowhide into the thinnest possible single strip, and uses it to outline the land she wants for her new civilization. There is actually a modern mathematical theorem named after this deed, “Dido’s Problem,” which determines the greatest area a straight line and a curved line can produce. So she founds her city, Carthage, and becomes queen. Because she was unwed, the neighboring civilizations pressured her to get married, as well as her own people, but Dido continued to say no, and in the end killed herself on a pyre to escape this predicament. All of this is related by the historian Timaeus (FGH 566 F82), suggesting that she was a real figure in history.

But thanks to Vergil, she has entered Roman mythology. In his Aeneid, the epic poem about the founder of proto-Rome, Aeneas, a Trojan refugee, Vergil has Aeneas land in Carthage after a shipwreck, and the goddesses Venus and Juno conspire to make Dido fall madly in love with him, Juno in hopes that he will stay and never reach Italy, Venus to ensure his safety in the land while his ships are rebuilt. In reality, their meeting is impossible, as the myth of the Trojan war happened well before the historical time period Dido would have existed in, as Heywood points out. Vergil also changes the queen’s ending—rather than have her kill herself out of desperation to be rid of suitors, Vergil’s Dido kills herself after being abandoned by Aeneas.

The love affair of Dido and Aeneas consists of the entirety of the fourth book of Vergil’s Aeneid. And ever since, Dido has been incredibly popular, especially with female audiences. I won’t go through the full history of the reception of Dido, but I do want to point out some important instances from antiquity. Shortly after the Aeneid was punished, the Roman poet Ovid writes his Heroides, letters from abandoned women to the men who left them, and includes Dido’s suicide note as one. As I argue in the forthcoming chapter, Ovid’s Dido resists the interpretation of having killed herself out of love—she views it as a way to free herself from that love, stabbing herself exactly in the same place where Cupid’s arrow made her fall in love in the first place. Later, after Ovid was exiled for writing sexually explicit poetry under new moral reform laws, he states that

Et tamen ille tuae felix Aeneidos auctor

          Contulit in Tyrios arma virumque toros,

Nec legitur pars ulla magis de corpore toto,

          Quam non legitimo foedere iunctus amor.

 

And nevertheless that lucky author of your Aeneid

          Brought the man and his arms into Tyrian beds,

And no part of the entire text is read more

          Than the love joined by an illegitimate bond (Ovid Tristia 2.533-6).

 

This sarcastic statement tells us that Book 4 of the Aeneid was incredibly popular immediately after the poem was published (and also points out the hypocrisy that Ovid was exiled for writing about love affairs but Vergil was praised for it). A later remark from the satirist Juvenal shows that this was especially true of female readers. In his 6^th Satire, a 661-line long poem about how awful women are, includes a rant about educated women:

 

illa tamen grauior, quae cum discumbere coepit

laudat Vergilium, periturae ignoscit Elissae,

 

Nevertheless, she is worse, who when she begins to recline at dinner

Praises Vergil, excuses Dido who is about to die… (Juvenal Satires 6.434-5)

 

Although completely misogynistic in its intents, these lines reveal two things: women in ancient Rome defended Dido, and men found both them and Dido annoying. 

Since antiquity, so many adaptations of the tragedy of Dido and Aeneas have been made. And yet, in the recent influx of female-centered, ‘feminist’ retellings of myth, Dido has been conspicuously absent. Up until Heywood’s book, there have only been two that specifically retell the story through Dido’s eyes, Dido (2009) by Adèle Geras and L’Eneide di Didone (2022) by Marilù Oliva. Other retellings feature Dido, such as the Ashes of Olympus trilogy, which is a young adult adaptation of the whole Aeneid. In recent years, there have also been adaptations of Ovid’s Heroides that draw on both Ovid and Vergil, like “The Choice,” a staged monologue by Stella Duffy (2020), and Valeria Parella’s Italian adaptation from Le Nuove Eroidi (2019).

It has always astounded me that Dido has been so overlooked in modern media, and it wasn’t until reading the Author’s Note of Oliva’s novel that I realized why. Here I’ll provide the note in its original Italian as well as my own translation:

 

Questo libro nasce da una domanda che forse in molti – e soprattutto in molte – di noi si sono rivolti/e: come è possibile che una donna forte, determinata e autonoma come Didone, regina di popoli, in fuga da un fratello assassino e avido, abbia deciso di uccidersi per un uomo che – si sapeva fin dall’inizio – era solo di passaggio? Siamo quasi tutti/e rimasti delusi per il modo in cui una regina dal carattere così risoluto abbia posto fine alla sua vita e abbia abbandonato il progetto per cui si era impegnata verso il suo popolo. Certo, Didone nell’Eneide è figura funzionale a una storia, imperniata su un uomo, che ha come scopo principale celebrare il più importante impero dell’antichità, secondo la veduta romanocentrica: Cartagine funge da area di sosta all’interno di un viaggio impegnativo e la sua regina – che dunque è soltanto una pedina di una scacchiera che per utilitas la contempla – potrebbe addirittura diventare un ostacolo per l’eroe, se non venisse in qualche modo eliminata. Ma Enea non potrebbe macchiarsi di un femminicidio efferato, quindi quale migliore escamotage letterario per estromettere una personalità scomoda, se non il suicidio? Un suicidio attestato dalla leggenda africana (sebbene con risvolti differenti), un atto che, a mio modesto parere, stona col personaggio, ma si inserisce perfettamente nella visione che il Poeta aveva della donna: “varium et mutabile semper femina” (sempre la donna è una cosa volubile e incostante, scrive al libro IV, vv. 569–70).

 

This book is born from a question that perhaps many—and above all many women—have turned to: how is it possible that a strong woman, determined and autonomous like Dido, queen of a people, on the run from a greedy and murderous brother, has decided to kill herself for a man who—it was known from the beginning—was only there in passing? We were almost all disappointed by the way in which this queen of such a resolute character ended her life and abandoned the project for which she had committed herself to her people. Certainly, the Dido of the Aeneid is a character functional to the story, centered on a man, which has as its central purpose the celebration of the most important empire of antiquity, according to the Romanocentric view. Carthage serves as a rest stop during a demanding journey and its queen—who is only a pawn on a chessboard that contemplates her for its own utility—could really become an obstacle for the hero, if she weren’t somehow eliminated. But Aeneas could not be stained with a brutal femicide, so what a better literary trope to oust an inconvenient suicide? A suicide attested by African legend (although for different implications), an action that, in my modest opinion, clashes with her character, but it fits perfectly with the vision that the Poet has of women: varium et mutabile semper femina (a woman is always changeable and inconstant, written in book 4 vv.569–750).” (Oliva 2022, 218–19)

 

These female centered, ‘feminist’ retellings are meant to show the power of the often overlooked women of mythology. And Dido is such a strong character, until you get to her end.

So how do we make Dido appealing to a modern audience?

In my forthcoming chapter, I argue that many of the adaptations I just mentioned do so by incorporating elements of Ovid’s Heroides into Dido’s story.

Heywood just removes Vergil from the equation.

I don’t mean she doesn’t have Aeneas show up, or that elements from the Aeneid are not present in the narrative. She is clearly using the Aeneid as inspiration, as the epigraph of the book is the first two lines of book 4 of the Aeneid:

 

At regina gravi iamdudum saucia cura

vulnus alit venis et caeco carpitur igni

 

But the queen had long since been suffering from love’s deadly wound, feeding it with her blood and being consumed by its hidden fire (Aen. 4.1-2, tr. West, the translation used by Heywood).

 

Rather than being a retelling of the Aeneid, The Wandering Queen is an exploration of what would happen if the ‘historical’ figure of Aeneas met the historical figure of Dido, without divine interference, divine fates, etc. What happens when two born leaders are thrust out of their beloved homes by tragedy, become refugees with a population dependent on them, and want to found a new home for their people?

I don’t want to give too much away about the ways in which Heywood negotiates the narrative, because the book just came out February 10, and I don’t want to spoil it. I do, however, want to quickly go over Heywood’s characterization of Dido, which I believe draws heavily on those two lines of the Aeneid that she uses at the beginning of her book.

While in Vergil, these lines refer to Dido’s god-born desire for Aeneas, Heywood’s Dido is characterized by bearing “love’s deadly wound” from the very beginning of her story. The narrative jumps back and forth between Elissa (Dido’s Caananite/Phoenician) name as a young woman and Dido, queen of Carthage.

Elissa is characterized by her deep love for her country. As the eldest daughter of the king, Elissa has been trained by her father to be a perceptive politician, and on his deathbed he declares she should co-rule with her half-brother Pygmalion. However, the council double crosses the king, and Dido is not allowed to rule and her half-brother, a young boy not suited to rule, goes along with everything they suggest. Rather than give up power and be married off, Elissa arranges a marriage with the head priest of the city’s god, and works with him to help the people of Tyre. When her passion leads her husband, Zakarbaal, to political problems, putting them both at risk, Zakarbaal says “This fire in you. If you do not face it, perhaps it will consume you” (Heywood 2026, 135). By using the imagery of fire here, Heywood shows that Dido has always had a fire in her. And when Zakarbaal is murdered, Dido tricks Pygmalion and escapes with a bunch of Tyrian refugees, determined to find a new home for the people she loves.

Meanwhile, in the Carthage chapters, Dido initially takes Aeneas in as a guest, and while she finds him intriguing and attractive, stands by her vow to never marry. Her friends tell her it has been long enough, and that it is okay to give in to passion. But many times, her conversations with Aeneas end in frustration, as both have trauma in their past that affects how they treat each other, as well as individual determination to be the leader of their people. They finally give in and start their affair, but Aeneas soon becomes impatient being second in command. Despite having strong feelings for him, Dido’s love for Aeneas is never described as fire until he decides to leave her:

 

The pain that had begun in her heart had spread itself like fire, and the whole careful structure she had built, to raise up their love, to shelter it, to strengthen it, to screen its widening cracks, was collapsing in the flames. She had staked herself on that monument, and even as it burned she could not leave it, but only rage at Aeneas for lighting the fire (Heywood 2026, 297).

 

Dido has done everything she can for her people, and it is not her love for Aeneas that destroys her, but the passion of the pain it causes her when she realizes she put it all at risk for a man who did not love her back.

I will not give away how Heywood deals with the end of Dido’s story. I do think that her tactic, of historicizing the myth, and removing Vergil from the picture, is an effective way of writing a Dido that appeals to modern audiences. By removing divine influence, Dido’s fire becomes a love for her people that consumes her. Throughout the book, Elissa/Dido truly is a dux femina facti, even at the very end.

I also applaud Heywood for her use of Caananite/Phoenician names for the Tyrian parts of the book. It adds to the realization that this is not a novelization of Vergil but a novelization of Dido, as the subtitle “A Novel of Dido” suggests.

I want to end by thanking Claire Heywood for her initial generosity in July, and apologize for taking so long to give you my thoughts. The Wandering Queen is the Dido we needed.