Dido and Aeneas, the queen of Carthage and the fleeing hero

Among the most widely read pages of Latin poetry is the fourth book of the Aeneid, devoted to the love between Dido, queen of Carthage, and Aeneas, the Trojan refugee destined to found in Italy the line of Rome. Virgil composed it in the last years of his life, before 19 BC, and made it one of the most intense love tragedies of antiquity.

A founding queen

Dido, also called Elissa, was a Phoenician princess of Tyre. Her brother Pygmalion, king of the city, killed her husband Sychaeus to seize his wealth. Warned in a dream, Dido fled by sea with the treasure and a group of loyal followers and landed on the coast of Africa, where she founded Carthage. According to legend she bought as much land as a bull's hide could enclose, and cut the hide into very thin strips.

When Aeneas' fleet, scattered by a storm sent by Juno, reaches her shores, Dido welcomes the Trojans generously. At the banquet Aeneas tells of the fall of Troy and of his long voyage. Venus, to protect her son, arranges for Cupid to kindle an irresistible love in the queen. It is a spell of the gods.

The old flame

Dido had sworn faithfulness to the memory of Sychaeus. Confiding in her sister Anna, she admits that she recognises in herself «veteris vestigia flammae», the traces of the old flame. Dante would take up those words in the Purgatorio, at the return of Beatrice. Anna encourages her, and during a hunt a storm drives Dido and Aeneas to shelter in the same cave, where they come together.

Dido calls that union marriage, while Virgil calls it a fault and the beginning of ruin. Rumour spreads the news, and the African king Iarbas, a rejected suitor, complains to Jupiter. The father of the gods sends Mercury to remind Aeneas of his destiny: he must not linger in Carthage, but must reach Italy.

Abandonment and the pyre

Aeneas prepares his departure in secret. Dido discovers it and confronts him with a speech full of grief and anger, but he replies that he does not seek Italy by his own choice. When the Trojan ships leave the harbour, the queen has a pyre raised, climbs onto it and stabs herself with the sword Aeneas had left her, cursing him.

In her curse she calls for an avenger to arise from her bones, «exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor». Roman readers recognised in it Hannibal and the legendary origin of the Punic Wars. In the sixth book Aeneas meets her in the underworld, among the souls who died of love: she listens in silence, turns her back on him and returns to her first husband, Sychaeus.

A story that moved the centuries

The ancients already knew that the chronology did not fit: tradition placed the founding of Carthage centuries after the Trojan War, and the historian Justin reports an older version in which Elissa kills herself so as not to marry Iarbas, with no Aeneas at all. Saint Augustine recalls in the Confessions that as a boy he wept over Dido's death, and Dante places her among the lustful in the fifth canto of the Inferno.

In musical theatre the queen found a new voice in Henry Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, around 1689, and in Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens. Her fate brings out the human cost of Aeneas' mission: Rome is born also from the sacrifice of a woman who had believed in a love. Few figures of ancient poetry have spoken so directly to later ages.