There are certain moments in Western art that just stand on their own.

They need no explanation, no analysis.

No explanation can do them justice because they are so powerful, so iconic as representations of a particular feeling,

experience, they just capture something that sticks in the mind. You know, like that painting

by Caspar David Friedrich, the wanderer above a sea of fog. There's nothing quite like it.

The minute you see it, you recognize it, and it just speaks directly into the heart of a moment.

Or, you know, the balcony scene, Romeo and Juliet. The moment in Super Mario, where Toad tells you that the princess is in another castle, you know, these sorts of great triumphs, iconic triumphs of Western literature, we're coming up on one now.

And we've been working our way through the Aeneid, and we are finally at the end of book four, which means, my friends, with genuine sorrow and

melancholy, I never come up on this without getting hit in the fields. It is time for us to say

goodbye to Queen Dido of Carthage.

Well, we've been following this love story since book one of the poem from the opening.

It's been going on in the background even of books two and three, where Aeneas tells his story of war.

But it's all been leading up to this.

And the scene in which Anius and Dido finally confront

one another, and Aeneas has to turn away and move on toward Italy is just one of those

ineradicable moments. It's something that once you read it for the first time,

if you really are paying attention to it, if you've really connected with these characters up to

this moment, it never leaves you, it never goes away. It becomes a part of your soul. And there

are just countless reproductions, recreations of this moment in the Galleria Borghese in Rome,

which is one of my favorite museums in the entire world, there is a Dido room just devoted to this whole story and this tragedy.

There have been operas made about it. There have's art down throughout the years. And so to connect,

to really grasp everything that's going on here is obviously important for our series on the

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