Diu rîche vrouwe Dîdô (v. 7558): Dido as Exemplar in the Erec‐Romance of Hartmann von Aue

Hartmann's narrator reports that Enite rides on an ornamental saddle engraved with scenes from the life of Aeneas, including his tragic liaison with Dido, the Carthaginian queen. A similar, but much truncated scene appears in Erec et Enide of Chrétien de Troyes. Hartmann relies on a sophisticated audience, able to recognize analogies and to draw conclusions. He is indebted both to Ovid and to John of Salisbury, the former identifying Dido as an abandoned woman at the mercy of the wily Aeneas. According to the Ovidian interpretation, Dido's only crime is that she loves to excess. The latter views Dido as the very model of bad governance; she is a failed queen whose slide into amatory idleness has a profound negative effect on her subjects. Critics dispute the significance of the German Dido allusions, uncertain whether the ekphrastic fragments convey an overt message that is relevant to interpreting the text. Most believe that Hartmann aims here to create a resemblance between Enite and Dido; thus Aeneas and Erec would be analogically paired. I argue in this paper that the reverse is true. The images of Dido on Enite's saddle have direct application to Erec, heir to a kingdom, who is meant to learn from Dido's obsessive love what to imitate in her political career, and what to avoid. Erec, like Dido, confounds the public and private spheres, withdrawing after his marriage to Enite from the world of knighthood to a hermetic realm of regal inaction. Dido's image on Enite's saddle is meant to remind Erec of the time when he followed her into erotic idleness, and to point to the future when he, unlike Dido, will follow his sense of honor to thrive as an active monarch.