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If you\'re really unlucky you may have met someone like Juno. She could be a distant relative who comes to the annual family reunion hopelessly overdressed and wants you to tell her how great she looks. You have to flatter her or she\'ll pester you all evening. She remembers all insults--real or imagined--and she talks about them for hours. She can\'t imagine what she ever did to deserve such disrespect. When the party\'s over, she still insists that no one paid any attention to her.
But Juno\'s even worse than this because she\'s a real troublemaker. She doesn\'t just talk about how angry she is, she acts on it. Since she\'s a goddess (and married to Jupiter) she can cause big trouble. If she wants a storm she can get it, and when she wants an evil demon, like Allecto, to drive people crazy all she has to do is call. Juno never controls her feelings. She simply lets everything out--and it\'s all bad.
The strangest thing is that Juno, despite her ruthlessness, never gets what she wants. Have you ever noticed how true that is about angry people? They just go from one fight to another, but they never seem to win. Why is that? One reason is that they are often irrational. They pick fights they can\'t win. They\'re also very self-destructive. They\'re so angry that they don\'t realize that their plans will backfire and produce exactly what they don\'t want. A good example of this is Juno\'s invention of a mock marriage between Dido and Aeneas in order to force Aeneas to stay in Carthage. Aeneas leaves anyway and Dido\'s life is ruined.
Why is Juno so angry at the Trojans? She has one petty reason--she lost a beauty contest--and one good reason. Carthage is Juno\'s favorite city and Rome (which the Trojans will found) is destined to destroy Carthage. That sounds like a rather good reason to be furious, and it is. However, no one, not even Juno, can change that destiny. It\'s inevitable. It\'s a part of fate and in Virgil\'s world even the gods can\'t change fate. So, in fighting fate, Juno is doing something basically irrational. She\'s fighting a battle she can never win. All she can do is make trouble.
This gives you a clue to what Juno symbolizes in the Aeneid. She is a force for disorder. Her uncontrolled rage does nothing but cause misery and death. Her weapons are found in nature: storms and fire on one hand, passions in men on the other. Thus, one way you can view Juno is as a symbol of violent and destructive forces that are always present in the world.
Juno will never stop on her own, but after her anger has burned itself out a bit, she will obey a command to stop from a god more powerful than she. That\'s Jupiter, her husband and the king of the gods. Similarly, you\'ll see that the effects of her rage on men like Turnus can eventually be controlled by other men, like Aeneas, who are strong enough to impose order.
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