He, when he heard a fugitive could move
The Tyrian princess, who disdain'd his love,
His breast with fury burn'd, his eyes with fire,
Mad with despair, impatient with desire;
Then on the sacred altars pouring wine,
He thus with pray'rs implor'd his sire divine:
"Great Jove! propitious to the Moorish race,
Who feast on painted beds, with off'rings grace
Thy temples, and adore thy pow'r divine
With blood of victims, and with sparkling wine,
Seest thou not this? or do we fear in vain
Thy boasted thunder, and thy thoughtless reign?
-Book 4, The Aeneid, John Dryden trans.
King Hiarbas gave his love to Dido the Tyrian princess when she arrived on his North African shore in flight from Phoenicia fearing for her life, but she preferred the Trojan fugitive Aeneas, and he her, so Hiarbas invoked the anger of Jove who had long protected his god-fearing people. Foreign women unwilling to be faithful, he declared, must forevermore sacrifice their blood in order that such sexual humiliation be avenged.
Maybe Raphael Patai, author of The Arab Mind, a study of Arab psychology from the school of so-called “diaperology”, as was Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, by which an entire people are reduced first to the shame of their toilet training and later to the humiliation of their initial sexual stirrings, was on to something real- not just the bad Freudian joke that Patai’s work and all diaperology is known as today. And maybe Virgil got there first with the idea that Arabs, Moors, Numidians, Garamantians, Gaetulians, Berbers, etc. all have the same kinds of problem with foreign women, especially those who reject or are unfaithful to them with other men. Othello, in whose painted bed lies Desdemona tonight?