emotional point that, like Desdemona, Dido comes to love Aeneas as he tells her of the dangers he has passed. Juno is an
unscrupulous enemy of the Trojans and anxious to frustrate the will of Jupiter and Fate, and we now see that Venus is essentially
no different. She is on the right side because it happens that Aeneas is her son, but not for the right reason; and at Carthage she
gets him into a terrible difficulty.
The Story Of Dido And Aeneas: fourth-century A.D. mosaic found at Low Ham in Somerset. The events are related
counterclockwise from the bottom right, beginning with the arrival of Aeneas' ships on the African coast. At the top Venus
supervises the meeting of Aeneas and the Carthaginian queen, at the left they go hunting, and at the bottom they embrace while
sheltering from the storm described in Virgil's Aeneid 4. In the central octagon Venus is flanked by Cupids with lowered and
raised torches, symbolizing respectively the death of Dido and the continuing life of Aeneas.