Juno's Wrath: Why Carthage Must Be Destroyed

She knows she will lose.

The Aeneid begins with the goddess Juno standing on the shore of the Mediterranean looking at the Trojan fleet and knowing — because she is a goddess and the decrees of fate are not hidden from the gods — that these ships will reach Italy, that the Trojans will found Alba Longa, that their descendants will found Rome, and that Rome will destroy Carthage, which she loves above every city, which she has been building with her own divine care, which is the city she wants to be the world’s capital.

She is not wrong about what will happen. She is not deluded. She simply refuses, with the full force of a major goddess’s will, to let it happen without the maximum possible resistance.

She goes to Aeolus, the god of winds, and offers him a prize if he will send a storm to scatter the Trojan fleet. She will give him the most beautiful of the storm-nymphs as his wife if he does this. Aeolus — who rules the winds only because Jupiter gave him the job, and who knows perfectly well that this request is not strictly within the bounds of the divine order — does it anyway. The storm nearly sinks the Trojans. Neptune himself has to calm the sea, grumbling at Juno’s interference with his domain.

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Her grievances are specific.

Virgil catalogs them in the opening lines of the poem, and they are not the grievances of a petty deity: Troy humiliated her in the Judgment of Paris. Troy gave the prize of the golden apple to Venus instead of Juno. Her beloved Ganymede was stolen from his family to pour wine for Jupiter. Her champion Hera-goddess, warrior-queen, could not prevent the fall of a city she loved.

And now the descendants of those same Trojans are sailing to Italy to found a city that will, in the fullness of time, burn Carthage to the ground and salt the earth where it stood.

She is the Queen of Heaven, wife of Jupiter, patron of marriage and sovereignty, worshipped on the Capitoline Hill as one of the three great gods of Rome. She is also the divine patron of Carthage specifically — the goddess the Carthaginians worship as Tanit, the great goddess of North Africa. In Virgil’s cosmology, Juno is fighting to preserve her favored city against the city that will be dedicated to Jupiter and named for a wolf’s son. She is fighting on the wrong side of fate, which is to say the human side, the side that cannot win.

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In Latium she finds her last tool: Allecto.

The Fury Allecto — one of the three divine instruments of madness and vengeance — is dispatched by Juno to inflame the Latin queen Amata against Aeneas and to inflame the Rutulian king Turnus against the Trojan intruders. Juno calls her up from the underworld and says clearly: I know I am not allowed to prevent this war. I want the delay.

Allecto does her work. Amata goes mad with Bacchic frenzy. Turnus rages for war. The war in Latium begins, costing thousands of lives on both sides, delaying the founding of Rome by years, consuming the energy that could have been put toward building.

Jupiter sees this and sends Mercury to warn Juno: enough. The divine plan will proceed. She is slowing it, not stopping it.

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Her capitulation is the most moving moment of the poem, and the most theologically significant.

Jupiter summons her on Olympus when the war in Latium is nearly decided. He does not threaten her. He asks: how long will this go on? She answers honestly: she knows she cannot win. She asks only for what she asked at the beginning of the divine council at the start of the poem — that the Latin name survive, that the Roman people be Italian not Trojan in culture and language, that her people not be subsumed into the foreigners she opposed.

Jupiter grants this. It is, in the poem’s logic, why Rome is Roman rather than Trojan — why the city speaks Latin rather than whatever language the Trojans spoke, why its gods are Italian as much as Olympian, why its culture is a mixture rather than a transplant. Juno’s opposition did not prevent Rome. It shaped Rome. The resistance that delayed the founding also ensured that what was founded was a genuinely new thing, a synthesis, a city that absorbed its enemies — which is what Rome, from the Sabine women onward, always did.

She leaves the poem satisfied, or as satisfied as a goddess who loved Carthage can be when she knows what Rome will do to it in three hundred years.

Delenda est Carthago — Carthage must be destroyed. The phrase was not Juno’s. But she understood it first.