My Enemy’s Enemy is My Enemy

Abstract

The portrait of Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid simultaneously telescopes alterity and sameness. Its barbaric and orientalising traits, highlighted by allusions to Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae and Aeschylus’ Persae, are counterbalanced by the presentation of Dido and her city as a mirroring image of Aeneas and Rome. While the theme of irrationality in Virgil’s Carthage can and has been studied in cultural continuity with ‘Doddsian’ Greek scholarship, this paper argues that Virgil exploits the ‘irrational’ deconstruction of the Greek vs Barbarian polarity present in Euripides’ Bacchae in order to show the irrationality inherent in writing about Carthage with the civil wars in mind. After explaining why I find that a ‘Doddsian’ reading of irrationality in Virgil betrays a Romantic belief in the superiority of Greek literature and culture, I approach the topic through the lens of Sallust’s view that the disappearance of metus hostilis after Carthage’s destruction was the first cause of the crisis which eventually brought about the civil wars. The barbaric, and specifically Persian, traits of Virgil’s Carthage, here discussed in detail, create continuity between the Persian Wars, the Punic Wars, and Augustus’ proposed wars against the Parthians, warding off the danger of further civil wars through the evocation of metus hostilis. At the same time, however, the analogies between Carthage and Rome and the irrational riddle of identities which Virgil stages between Trojans, Carthaginians and Greeks in his poem, provides a new, illogical phrasing to the famous proverb, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend,’ which exemplifies Sallust’s Theorem of Negative Association.