More than a Woman: Dido and Aeneas's Epic Love Affair
Young Heretics
Spencer Klavan
4.9 • 4.5K Ratings
🗓️ 4 February 2025
⏱️ 62 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Who's that dime walking down the temple corridor? Is it Juno? Venus? Diana? Cleopatra? No, it's Dido, queen of Carthage and warrior princess of Tyre. In this episode, Virgil introduces one of literature's all-time greatest heroines, high on her throne but doomed to fall. She's demure...or is she? She's mother...or not? Whatever she is, she's always a woman to me. And to Aeneas, who at this point can't do much more than stare at her like a dope.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | More than a woman |
| 0:03.0 | More than a woman to me |
| 0:09.0 | More than a woman |
| 0:12.0 | More than a woman to me |
| 0:22.6 | Okay Google stop to me. Okay, Google, stop. |
| 0:28.6 | Um, that is not something I thought I would ever find myself doing when I started this podcast. |
| 0:36.6 | I hope you people appreciate |
| 0:38.7 | the lengths I go to to keep you entertained. I actually thought that was a perfect song to start |
| 0:46.9 | this show because today is all about Dido, Queen Dido, Goddess Queen, almost of Carthage. She, if anybody ever was, is more than a woman. |
| 1:00.0 | And what we have to talk about today is the meeting between Aeneas and Dido. We've been building up to it and building up to it. |
| 1:07.0 | And it's going to take us a couple episodes, I think, to really grapple with everything |
| 1:11.9 | that this means. Virgil expertly introduces us to this magnificent woman, this woman who's like |
| 1:19.5 | a goddess, who's almost descended from heaven, something ethereal, a vision that Aeneas, |
| 1:26.6 | after having washed up bedraggled on shore, is likely to fall |
| 1:31.2 | head over heels in love with. And what we are, in fact, on the verge of is truly, in every |
| 1:37.6 | sense of the term, an epic romance. It's a tragic romance. And we know that from the outset, |
| 1:43.7 | because of everything we talked about last week. |
| 1:46.1 | We know that the conflict between Rome and Carthage, which is represented in these two people, this storm-tossed founder of what will become Rome and this refugee queen of what is now Carthage, we know that that's standing in for this cataclysmic |
| 2:04.9 | confrontation between Rome and Carthage, which made Rome what it now is in Virgil's Day, |
| 2:10.5 | which is an empire. And the way that Virgil does this, we've talked about this last week, |
| 2:16.5 | is that he takes the grand |
| 2:19.3 | God's eye view of things, the retrospective history of it all, knowing now, looking back |
... |
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