When Aeneas arrives at Carthage in Book I of the Aeneid, the first thing to give our dutiful hero hope is a painting—a series of paintings, in fact, decorating the walls of a new temple to Juno and depicting the events of the Trojan War. Gratified to see Priam, Achilles, and other familiars on these murals, Aeneas reasons that the Carthaginians must be a sympathetic audience, for “Even here is praise for valor/ And tears of pity for a mortal world” (the famous lacrimae rerum). But hope and relief are not all he experiences: “With steady sobbing and great streams of tears,” Virgil tells us, Aeneas then “fed his heart on shallow images.”
