DIDO
Anna soror, quae me suspensam insomnia terrent!
quis novus hic nostris successit sedibus hospes,
quem sese ore ferens, quam forti pectore et armis!
Quis hospes: what guest
Quis novus hospes: what strange guest
Quis novus hic hospes: what strange guest here
Quis novus hic hospes successit: what strange guest here has arrived at
Quis novus hic hospes nostris successit sedibus: what strange guest here has arrived at our home?
He is noble, to judge by his face, and how strong he is in his chest and in his deeds of war!
I said in the film that armis is ambiguous as to whether it means arms with blades or arms with elbows. The military reading is the natural one. The Aeneid is in one sense a war poem. It’s very first word is arma. But Virgil leaves an uncertainty here as to whether Dido is praising Aeneas’s fortitude and combat skills, or simply swooning at his body. Why would he do this?
I think he is trying to show us a slow dissolve in Dido’s view of her relationship with the hero. She greeted him as a queen to a wandering sailor, but that assertion of power is being replaced by the attitude of a woman to a man, with everything this implied (in the ancient world) of submission and loss of rank. The whole dramatic question of Book IV is whether Aeneas will forsake his mission for the lure of love. The very beginning of the book implies that Dido has done exactly that.