Essay on Love and Duty in Virgil’s Aeneid and Augustine’s...

In his Confessions, Augustine relates that, in his school years, he was required to read Virgil’s Aeneid. The ill-fated romance of Aeneas and Dido produced such an emotional effect on him. Augustine says that Virgil’s epic caused him to forget his own â€Å"wanderings† (Augustine 1116). He wept over Dido’s death, but remained â€Å"dry-eyed to [his] own pitiful state† (Augustine 1116 – 7). Augustine later rejects literature and theater because he believes that they distract the soul from God. Nonetheless, Augustine shares many of the same experience as the characters in the Aeneid. Augustine discovers that love can be destructive, just as it was for Dido. Both Aeneas and Augustine of them give up love for the sake of duty. Aeneas leaves Dido to†¦show more content†¦She confronts him asking, â€Å"Can our love/Not hold you†¦?† (Virgil 983). She says that if Aeneas leaves her, then she is a â€Å"dying woman† (Virgi l 984). When Aeneas persists in his decision to leave, she insults him and angrily sends him away. She calls him a â€Å"liar and cheat† (Virgil 985). Dido’s heart is broken at Virgil’s forsaking of her. She becomes inflicted by a â€Å"fatal madness† and is â€Å"resolved to die† (Virgil 988). After praying for enmity between her descendants and Aeneas’, she climbs atop a pyre of Aeneas’ belongings and stabs herself. Love becomes an obsessive passion to Dido; her life is empty without it. She does not have the will to live forsaken by her lover. She kills herself for love. The poet exclaims, â€Å"Unconscionable Love,/To what extremes will you not drive our hearts!† (Virgil 986). Augustine considers his greatest sin to be the sin of lust. He is held fast by the chains of love and its physical pleasures. Augustine says that his â€Å"one delight was to love and be loved† (Augustine 1118). As an adolescent he â€Å"could not distinguish the white light of love from the fog of lust† (Augustine 1118). There is a difference between love and lust. Love is pure and noble; lust is a base desire. Augustine went to study at Carthage, â€Å"where a cauldron of illicit loves leapt and boiled about [him]† (Augustine 1121). Interestingly, Carthage is the city where Aeneas had his affair with Dido. Augustine says that he â€Å"in