Dido

Name

Many names in the legend of Dido are of Punic origin, which suggests that the first Greek authors who mention this story have taken up Phoenician accounts. One suggestion is that Dido is an epithet from the same Semitic root as David, which means "Beloved". Others state Didô means "the wanderer".

According to Marie-Pierre Noël, "Elishat/Elisha" is a name repeatedly attested on Punic votives. It is composed of:

the Punic reflex of *ʾil- "god", which can mean the remote Phoenician creator god El, or it can be names of God in Judaism,

and

"‐issa", which could be either "ʾiš" (𐤀𐤎), meaning "fire", or another word for "woman".

Other works state that it is the feminine form of El. In Greek it appears as Theiossô, which translates Élissa: el becoming theos.

Early accounts

The oldest references to Dido's character can be traced to the lost writings of Sicilian historian Timaeus of Tauromenium (c. 356–260 BC). In his Histories, Timaeus claims that Dido founded Carthage in 814 BC, around the same time as the founding of Rome.

Appian, in the beginning of his Punic Wars, claims that Carthage was founded by Zorus and Carchedon. However, Zorus looks like an alternative transliteration of the city name Tyre, while Carchedon is just the Greek form of Carthage. Timaeus named Carchedon's wife as Elissa, the sister of King Pygmalion of Tyre. Archaeological evidence of settlement on the site of Carthage before the last quarter of the 8th century BC has yet to be found.

That the city is named 𐤒𐤓𐤕 𐤇𐤃𐤔𐤕‎ (Qart-hadasht, or "New City") at least indicates it was a colony.

Trogus and Justin

The only surviving full account of Dido's story before Virgil's treatment is that of Virgil's contemporary, Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, in his Philippic Histories, which was reworked into an epitome by Junianus Justinus (Justin) in the 3rd century AD.

Justin, quoting or paraphrasing Trogus, writes that the king of Tyre made his beautiful daughter Dido (Elissa) and son Pygmalion his joint heirs. However, upon the king's death, the people took Pygmalion alone as their ruler, even though he was still a child. Dido married her uncle Acerbas, who, as priest of Heracles (Melqart), was second in power to the king. There were rumors that Acerbas had secretly buried a large store of gold, and Pygmalion had Acerbas murdered in hopes of claiming it for himself. Dido was enraged, and eventually planned to trick her brother and flee Tyre.

Dido pretended to want to move into Pygmalion's home; her brother agreed, as he believed Dido would bring Acerbas' stores of gold with her when she moved. He sent a number of attendants to help her. She filled bags with sand, and, pretending they were gold, had the attendants cast them into the sea, pretending that they were an offering to her late husband's shade. Dido then persuaded the attendants to join her in flight to another land rather than face Pygmalion's anger when he discovered what had supposedly become of Acerbas' wealth. Some sympathetic senators also joined her.

The group first arrived at Cyprus. There, Dido ordered her party to seize eighty women working as prostitutes on the shore, so that her men would have wives and eventually be able to populate her future city.

Eventually Dido and her followers arrived on the coast of North Africa. There, she bargained with the locals for a small piece of land to act as a refuge until she could continue her journeying: only as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide. They agreed. Dido then cut the oxhide into fine strips so that she had enough to encircle an entire nearby hill, which was afterwards named Byrsa ("hide").

Dido and her party established a settlement on the hill. Locals began to join the group, and both they and envoys from the nearby Phoenician city of Utica urged the building of a city. While digging the foundation, an ox's head was found, indicating that the city that would be wealthy but subjected to the rule of others if built at that site. In response to this portent, another area of the hill was dug instead, where a horse's head was found, indicating that the city would be powerful and warlike. Carthage was thus founded, and the center of the city was the citadel on Byrsa.

Virgil's Aeneid

Dido flees Tyre

Virgil names Belus as Dido's father; this figure is occasionally referred to as Belus II by later commentators to distinguish him from Belus, son of Poseidon, and a figure in earlier Greek mythology. Classicist T. T. Duke suggests that this is a hypocoristicon of the historical father of Pygmalion and Dido, Mattan I, also known as MTN-BʿL (Matan-Baʿal, 'Gift of the Lord').

The Aeneid's narrative closely follows that of Trogus and Justin. However, while Trogus names the character Elissa, Virgil uses Dido as nominative, but uses Elissa (Eliza) in oblique cases. Virgil's Dido was a princess of Tyre who married Sychaeus (Acerbas), a wealthy priest of Hercules, while her father was still alive. Sychaeus had a large store of hidden wealth, and Dido's brother Pygmalion murdered the priest so he could claim this wealth for himself. Sychaeus appeared to Dido in a dream, revealed her brother's actions and the true location of his wealth, and urged her to flee Tyre. She obeyed, and left the city with those who hated or feared Pygmalion.

Aeneas arrives at Carthage

Aeneas, a Trojan prince who fled Troy after it fell to the Greeks, eventually landed on Carthage's shores after many years of wandering. Dido welcomed him warmly, having heard word about his exploits, and arranged a feast. However, Venus, Aeneas' mother, sensed that Dido and Carthage were under Juno's control. Unbeknownst to Aeneas, Venus tasked her other son, Cupid, with infiltrating the party in the guise of Aeneas's son Ascanius. Dido embraces the disguised Cupid, who plants in her heart a powerful, all encompassing love and desire for Aeneas. However, she was conflicted, as she had sworn never to remarry after her first husband was killed. Juno became aware of Venus' actions, and proposed that they marry the couple and join the pair's kingdoms. By the goddess' design, the pair consummated their relationship in a cave. However, while Dido called Aeneas her husband, Aeneas claimed they were never officially married.

When news of their relationship reached Iarbas, a son of Jupiter whose marriage offer Dido scorned, he angrily prayed to his father. Jupiter then dispatched Mercury to remind Aeneas of his journey and the city he was destined to found. Aeneas agreed and prepared to leave. When an enraged Dido confronted him and asked him to stay, he refused, as he could not deviate from his divinely ordained fate.

Dido's suicide

Dido was enraged by this betrayal, and could no longer bear to live. She had her sister Anna build a pyre under the pretense of burning all that reminded her of Aeneas, including weapons and clothes that he had left behind, and the couch she called their bridal bed. When Dido saw Aeneas' fleet leaving, she cursed him and proclaimed endless hate between Carthage and the descendants of Troy, foreshadowing the Punic Wars. Dido then ascended the pyre, laid again on the couch, and stabbed herself with Aeneas' sword. Anna rushed in and embraced her dying sister, and Juno sent Iris to release Dido's spirit from her body. From their ships, Aeneas and his crew saw the glow of the burning funeral pyre, and could only guess at what had happened.

At least two scholars have argued that the inclusion of the pyre as part of Dido's suicide— otherwise unattested in prior epics and tragedies— alludes to the self-immolation that took the life of Carthage's last queen, or the wife of its general Hasdrubal the Boetharch, in 146 BC.

After death

During his journey in the underworld, Aeneas met Dido's shade, soaked in blood. Aeneas cried and begged her to forgive him, but she averted her eyes and stayed silent before turning to walk into a grove where her former husband Sychaeus waited.

Later Roman tradition

Ovid

In Ovid's Heroides, Epistle 7 is Dido's address to Aeneas just before she ascends the pyre and commits suicide. The narrative aligns with Virgil's, and focuses on Dido's grief and anger at being left behind by her lover.

In the Fasti, Ovid narrates the life of Anna Perenna, a Roman goddess he identifies as Dido and Pygmalion's sister. After Dido's death, she is eventually shipwrecked onto the coasts of Latium, home to Aeneas' settlement of Lavinium. However, Aeneas' wife Lavinia became jealous. She planned to murder Anna, but Dido's unkempt, blood-soaked ghost appeared before her sister's bed as she slept, begging her to flee. Anna obeyed and was swept away by the river god Numicus and transformed into a river nymph.

Silius Italicus

Dido's figure influences the plot of Silius Italicus’s poem Punica, a retelling of the events of the Second Punic War which draws from the mythological roots of the conflict. In Book 1, Silius recounts Dido's founding of Carthage, ascribing the city's enmity with Rome to the conquering aspirations of its patron goddess Juno. In a temple on the site of Dido's suicide, a young Hannibal learns about this history from his father Hamilcar. Hannibal then swears his famous oath that he will oppose Rome in war to "Elissa [Dido], by your shade." In this book, Silius also traces the ancestry of the Barcid family to a younger brother of Dido.

In Book 8, the spirit of Dido's sister Anna is sent to Hannibal by Juno. Anna tells not only of Dido's suicide and a ghostly visit from her sister, but her own wanderings from Cyrene to Italy, where she is ultimately deified as a river. Anna’s tale, as well as her prophecy of Hannibal’s future triumph in the Battle of Cannae, rouses the Carthaginian general to battle.

Historicity and dating

The oxhide story which explains the name of the hill is most likely of Greek origin since Byrsa means "oxhide" in Greek, not in Punic. The name of the hill in Punic was probably just a derivation from Semitic brt "fortified place". But that does not prevent other details in the story from being Carthaginian, albeit still not necessarily historical. Michael Grant in Roman Myths (1973) claims that "Dido-Elissa was originally a goddess", and that she was converted from a goddess into a mortal (if still legendary) queen sometime in the later fifth century BC by a Greek writer.

Others conjecture that Dido was indeed historical, as described in the following accounts. It is unknown who first combined the story of Dido with the tradition that connected Aeneas either with Rome or with earlier settlements from which Rome traced its origin. A fragment of an epic poem by Gnaeus Naevius who died at Utica in 201 BC includes a passage which might or might not be part of a conversation between Aeneas and Dido. Servius in his commentary (4.682; 5.4) cites Varro (1st century BC) for a version in which Dido's sister Anna killed herself for love of Aeneas.

Evidence for the historicity of Dido (which is a question independent of whether or not she ever met Aeneas) can be associated with evidence for the historicity of others in her family, such as her brother Pygmalion and their grandfather Balazeros. Both of these kings are mentioned, as well as Dido, in the list of Tyrian kings given in Menander of Ephesus's list of the kings of Tyre, as preserved in Josephus's Against Apion, i.18. Josephus ends his quotation of Menander with the sentence "Now, in the seventh year of his [Pygmalion's] reign, his sister fled away from him and built the city of Carthage in Libya."

The Nora Stone, found on Sardinia, has been interpreted by Frank Moore Cross as naming pmy[y]tn or p‘mytn, which is rendered in the Greek tradition as Pygmalion, as the king of the general who was using the stone to record his victory over the local populace. On paleographic grounds, the stone is dated to the 9th century BC. (Cross's translation, with a longer discussion of the Nora stone, is found in the Pygmalion article). If Cross's interpretation is correct, this presents inscriptional evidence substantiating the existence of a 9th-century-BC king of Tyre named (in Greek) Pygmalion.

Continuing tradition

Numerous early Italian works refer to Dido, e.g., Proverbia super natura feminarum, 101-108 (Proverbs on the Nature of Women) (ca. 1152) and L’Intelligenza (1360-1380), where Dido is seen crying because Aeneas has left by sea. On seeing the departing sails billow in the air, she stabs herself in the stomach (stanzas 70-73).

In the Divine Comedy, Dante puts the shade of Dido (though not naming her) in the second circle of Hell (V, 61-62), where she is condemned among the lustful to be hurled for eternity in a fierce infernal storm ("la bufera infernal" [V, 31]). Virgil points to her saying, "L'altra è colei che s'ancise amorosa, / e ruppe fede al cener di Sicheo" ("The next is she who killed herself for love, / And broke faith with the ashes of Sichaeus" [Longfellow translation, 1867]).

Contrary to Dante’s view of Dido as lustful, Petrarch and Boccaccio, influenced by St. Jerome’s Against Jovinianus, portray Dido as a faithful wife to Sychaeus.

Petrarch refers to Dido both in his Trionfi, specifically in the "Triumph of Chastity," where she is an exemplary widow, as well as in one of the Letters of Old Age (Seniles, IV, 5). She also appears in his epic poem Africa (IV, 4-6).

Boccaccio refers to her at least eight times, most notably in chapter 42 of On Famous Women (1361-1362), the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women. Dido appears in five of his Italian works (Ninfale d’Ameto, Elegia di Madonna Fiammetta, Filocolo, Amorosa visione, and Teseida (VI, 45) and three times in Latin. In addition to On Famous Women, Dido’s story is narrated in his mythological treatise, On the Genealogy of the Gods, and in On the Fates of Famous Men.

In Renaissance Italy, Dido’s story appears most notably in three tragedies:

Alessandro Pazzi de' Medici, Dido in Cartagine (1524)

Giambattista Giraldi Cinthio, Didone (1543)