My Enemy’s Enemy is My Enemy

Abstract

Carthage in Virgil’s Aeneid simultaneously telescopes alterity and sameness: its barbaric and orientalizing 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. This chapter argues that the barbaric traits of Carthage 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 that Virgil stages between Trojans, Carthaginians, and Greeks 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.

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