Dido

Dido (

), in 814 BC. In most accounts, she was the queen of the Phoenician city-state of Tyre (located in Lebanon) who fled tyranny to found her own city in northwest Africa. Known only through ancient Greek and Roman sources, all of which were written well after Carthage's founding, her historicity remains uncertain. The oldest references to Dido are attributed to Timaeus, who was active around 300 BC, about five centuries after the date given for the foundation of Carthage.

Details about Dido's character, life, and role in the founding of Carthage are best known from the account given in Virgil's epic poem, the Aeneid, written around 20 BC, which tells the legendary story of the Trojan hero Aeneas. Dido is described as a clever and enterprising woman who flees her ruthless and autocratic brother, Pygmalion, after discovering that he was responsible for her husband's death. Through her wisdom and leadership, the city of Carthage is founded and made prosperous.

Dido remains an enduring figure in Western culture and arts since the early Renaissance and into the 21st century. In the early 20th century, she was also chosen as a national symbol in Tunisian nationalism and so Tunisian women can be poetically referred to as "Daughters of Dido".

Dido (Elissa) has also been represented on Tunisian currency in 2006.^[2]

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".^[3] Others state Didô means "the wanderer".^[4][5]

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", the remote Phoenician creator god El, also a name for God in Judaism, and "‐issa", which could be either "ʾiš" (𐤀𐤎) means "fire", or another word for "woman".^[6] Other works state it is the feminine form of El.^[7] In Greek it appears as Theiossô, which translates Élissa: el becoming theos.^[4]

Early accounts

The person of Dido can be traced to references by Roman historians to

in Sicily (c. 356–260 BC).

Ancient historians gave various dates, both for the foundation of Carthage and the foundation of Rome. Appian, in the beginning of his Punic Wars, claims that Carthage was founded by a certain Zorus and Carchedon, but Zorus looks like an alternative transliteration of the city name Tyre, while Carchedon is just the Greek form of Carthage. Timaeus made Carchedon's wife 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.

The only surviving full account before Virgil's treatment is that of Virgil's contemporary

in the 3rd century AD.

—was second in power to King Pygmalion. Rumor told that Acerbas had much wealth secretly buried, and King Pygmalion had Acerbas murdered in hopes of gaining this wealth. Dido, desiring to escape Tyre, expressed a wish to move into Pygmalion's palace, but she then ordered the attendants whom Pygmalion sent to aid in the move, to throw all Acerbas' bags of gold into the sea, apparently as an offering to his spirit. In fact, these bags contained only sand. 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 senators also joined her in her flight.

The party arrived at Cyprus, where the priest of

Jupiter

joined the expedition. There, the exiles also seized about eighty young women who were prostituting themselves on the shore, in order to provide wives for the men in the party.

Eventually Dido and her followers arrived on the coast of North Africa, where Dido asked the king

urged the building of a city. In digging the foundations, an ox's head was found, indicating a city that would be wealthy but subject to others. 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 in war.

But when the new city of Carthage had been established and become prosperous, Iarbas, a native king of the Maxitani or Mauritani (manuscripts differ), demanded Dido for his wife or he would make war on Carthage. Still, she preferred to stay faithful to her first husband, and after creating a ceremonial funeral pyre and sacrificing many victims to his spirit in pretense that this was a final honoring of her first husband in preparation for marriage to Iarbas, Dido ascended the pyre, announced that she would go to her husband as they desired, and then slew herself with her sword. After this self-sacrifice, Dido was deified and was worshipped as long as Carthage endured.^[10] In this account, the foundation of Carthage occurred 72 years before the foundation of Rome.

gives Sicharbas as the name of Dido's husband in early tradition.

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

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 BCE 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

(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 Pygmalion as the king of the general who was using the stone to record his victory over the local populace.^[11] 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.

Several scholars have identified Baa‘li-maanzer, the king of Tyre who gave tribute to Shalmaneser III in 841 BC, with 𐤁𐤏𐤋𐤏𐤑𐤅𐤓‎ Ba‘al-'azor (Phoenician form of the name) or Baal-Eser/Balazeros (Greek form of the name), Dido's grandfather.^{[12][13][14][15]} This lends credibility to the account in Josephus/Menander that names the kings of Tyre from Abibaal and Hiram I down to the time of Pygmalion and Dido.

Another possible reference to Balazeros is found in the Aeneid. It was a common ancient practice of using the

Even more important than the inscriptional and literary references supporting the historicity of Pygmalion and Dido are chronological considerations that give something of a mathematical demonstration of the veracity of the major feature of the Pygmalion/Dido saga, namely the flight of Dido from Tyre in Pygmalion's seventh year, and her eventual founding of the city of Carthage. Classical authors give two dates for the founding of Carthage. The first is that of Pompeius Trogus, mentioned above, that says this took place 72 years before the foundation of Rome. At least as early as the 1st century BC, and then later, the date most commonly used by Roman writers for the founding of Rome was 753 BC.^[17] This would place Dido's flight in 753 + 72 = 825 BC. Another tradition, that of the Greek historian Timaeus (c. 345–260 BC), gives 814 BC for the founding of Carthage. Traditionally most modern scholars have preferred the 814 date. However, the publication of the Shalmaneser text mentioning tribute from Baal-Eser II of Tyre in 841 BC caused a re-examination of this question, since the best texts of Menander/Josephus only allow 22 years from the accession of Baal-Eser/Balazeros until the seventh year of Pygmalion, and measuring back from 814 BC would not allow any overlap of Balazeros with the 841 tribute to Shalmaneser. With the 825 date for the seventh year of Pygmalion, however, Balazeros's last year would coincide with 841 BC, the year of the tribute. Additional evidence in favor of the 825 date is found in the statement of Menander, repeated by Josephus as corroborated from Tyrian court records (Against Apion i.17,18), that Dido's flight (or the founding of Carthage) occurred 143 years and eight months after Hiram of Tyre sent assistance to Solomon for the building of the Temple. Using the 825 date, this Tyrian record would then date the start of Temple construction in 969 or 968 BC, in agreement with the statement in 1 Kings 6:1 that Temple construction began in Solomon's fourth regnal year. Solomon's fourth year can be calculated as starting in the fall of 968 BC when using the widely accepted date of 931/930 BC for the division of the kingdom after the death of Solomon. These chronological considerations therefore definitely favor the 825 date over the 814 date for Dido's departure from Tyre. More than that, the agreement of this date with the timing of the tribute to Shalmaneser and the year when construction of the First Temple began provide evidence for the essential historicity of at least the existence of Pygmalion and Dido as well as their rift in 825 BC that eventually led to the founding of Carthage.

According to J. M. Peñuela, the difference in the two dates for the foundation of Carthage has an explanation if we understand that Dido fled Tyre in 825 BC, but eleven years elapsed before she was given permission by the original inhabitants to build a city on the mainland, years marked by conflict in which the Tyrians first built a small city on an island in the harbor.^[18] Additional information about Dido's activities after leaving Tyre are found in the Pygmalion article, along with a summary of later scholars who have accepted Peñuela's thesis.

If chronological considerations thus help to establish the basic historicity of Dido, they also serve to refute the idea that she could have had any liaison with

in the Aeneid.

Virgil's Aeneid

Louvre

)

Virgil's references in the Aeneid generally agree with what Justin's epitome of Trogus recorded. Virgil names Belus as Dido's father, this Belus sometimes being called

Virgil (1.343f) adds that the marriage between Dido and

Sychaeus

, as Virgil calls Dido's husband, occurred while her father was still alive. Pygmalion slew Sychaeus secretly due to his wealth and Sychaeus appeared to Dido in a dream in which he told the truth about his death, urged her to flee the country, and revealed to her where his gold was buried. She left with those who hated or feared Pygmalion. None of these details contradicts Justin's epitome, but Virgil very much changes the import and many details of the story when he brings Aeneas and his followers to Carthage.

(1.657f) Dido and Aeneas fall in love by the management of Juno and Venus, acting in concert, though for different reasons. (4.198f) When the rumour of the love affair comes to King Iarbas the Gaetulian, "a son of Jupiter Ammon by a raped Garamantian nymph", Iarbas prays to his father, blaming Dido who has scorned marriage with him yet now takes Aeneas into the country as her lord. (4.222f) Jupiter dispatches Mercury to send Aeneas on his way and the pious Aeneas sadly obeys. Mercury tells Aeneas of all the promising Italian lands and orders Aeneas to get his fleet ready.

(4.450f)

Dido can no longer bear to live. (4.474) She has her sister Anna build her a pyre under the pretence of burning all that reminded her of Aeneas, including weapons and clothes that Aeneas had left behind and (what she calls) their bridal bed (though, according to Aeneas, they were never officially married.) (4.584f) When Dido sees Aeneas' fleet leaving she curses him and his Trojans and proclaims endless hate between Carthage and the descendants of Troy, foreshadowing the Punic Wars. (4.642) Dido ascends the pyre, lies again on the couch which she had shared with Aeneas, and then falls on a sword that Aeneas had given her. (4.666) Those watching let out a cry; Anna rushes in and embraces her dying sister; Juno sends Iris from heaven to release Dido's spirit from her body. (5.1) From their ships, Aeneas and his crew see the glow of Dido's burning funeral pyre and can only guess what has happened. At least two scholars have argued that the inclusion of the pyre as part of Dido's suicide—otherwise unattested in epic and tragedy—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.^[20]

(6.450f) During his journey in the underworld Aeneas meets Dido and tries to excuse himself, but Dido does not deign to look at him. Instead she turns away from Aeneas to a grove where her former husband Sychaeus waits.

Virgil has included most of the motifs from the original: Iarbas who desires Dido against her will, a deceitful explanation for the building of the pyre, and Dido's final suicide. In both versions Dido is loyal to her original husband in the end. But whereas the earlier Elissa remained always loyal to her husband's memory, Virgil's Dido dies as a tortured and repentant woman who has fallen away from that loyalty.

Virgil consistently uses the form Dido as nominative, but derivates of Elissa for the oblique cases.

Later Roman tradition

Letter 7 of Ovid's Heroides is a fictional letter from Dido to Aeneas written just before she ascends the pyre. The situation is as in Virgil's Aeneid. In Ovid's Fasti (3.545f) Ovid introduced a kind of sequel involving Aeneas and Dido's sister Anna. See Anna Perenna.

The Barcids, the family to which Hannibal belonged, claimed descent from a younger brother of Dido according to Silius Italicus in his Punica (1.71–7).

The

.

Continuing tradition

In the Divine Comedy, Dante puts the shade of Dido in the second circle of Hell, where she is condemned (on account of her consuming lust) to be blasted for eternity in a fierce whirlwind.

This legend inspired the Renaissance drama Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe.^[21]

, in Lorenzo's and Jessica's mutual wooing:

In such a night
Stood Dido with a willow in her hand
Upon the wild sea banks and waft her love
To come again to Carthage.[22]

The story of Dido and Aeneas remained popular throughout the post-Renaissance era and was the basis for many operas, with the libretto by

, proving especially popular with composers throughout the eighteenth century and beyond:

• 1641: La Didone by Francesco Cavalli
• 1656: La Didone by Andrea Mattioli
• 1689: Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell
• 1693:
  Henry Desmarets
• 1707: Dido, Königin von Carthago by Christoph Graupner
• 1724: Didone abbandonata by Domenico Sarro
• 1726: Didone abbandonata by Leonardo Vinci
• 1740: Didone abbandonata by Baldassare Galuppi
• 1742: Didone abbandonata by Johann Adolph Hasse
• 1747: Didone abbandonata by Niccolò Jommelli
• 1762: Didone abbandonata by Giuseppe Sarti
• 1770: Didone abbandonata by Niccolò Piccinni
• 1783: Didon by Niccolò Piccinni
• 1823: Didone abbandonata by Saverio Mercadante
• 1860: Les Troyens by Hector Berlioz
• 2007: Aeneas and Dido by James Rolfe (composer)

Also from the 17th century is a

broadside, is called "The Wandering Prince of Troy", and it alters the end of the relationship between the two lovers, rethinking Dido's final sentiment for Aeneas and rewriting Aeneas's visit to the underworld as Dido's choice to haunt him.^[23]

In 1794 Germany,

Goethe, in a manner which she found reminiscent of Aeneas

.

Will Adams' 2014

Turkish Army

officers based in Cyprus.

In another modern interpretation, Dido appears in Sid Meier's strategy games Civilization II and Civilization V, as the leader of the Carthaginian civilization, although she appears alongside Hannibal in the former. In Civilization V, she speaks Phoenician, with a modern Israeli accent. In 2019, Dido was made the leader of Phoenicia in Civilization VI: Gathering Storm, with Tyre as its capital and Carthage as an available name for subsequent cities.

In honor of Dido, the asteroid

Mount Dido in Antarctica.^[25]

Remembrance of the story of the bull's hide and the foundation of Carthage is preserved in mathematics in connection with the

Isoperimetric problem

which is sometimes called Dido's Problem (and similarly the Isoperimetric theorem is sometimes called Dido's Theorem). It is sometimes stated in such discussion that Dido caused her thong to be placed as a half circle touching the sea coast at each end (which would add greatly to the area) but the sources mention the thong only and say nothing about the sea.

Carthage was the

Italy during the Fascist administration of the 1920s to 1940s, she was regarded as a rival and sometimes negative figure, perhaps not only as a symbol of Rome's nemesis, but because she represented together at least three other unpleasant qualities: her reputation for promiscuity, her "Semitic race"

, and for being a symbol of Rome's erstwhile rival Carthage. As an example, when the streets of new quarters in Rome were named after the characters of Virgil's Aeneid, only the name Dido did not appear.

Notes

1. ^ "Elissa – Dido Legend of Carthage". www.phoenician.org. Retrieved 14 April 2017.
2. JSTOR 10.7312/masr17950.13
   .
3. ^ Barton, Semitic and Hamitic Origins (1934) at 305.
4. ^ ^{a b} Noël 2014, p. 5
5. ^ María Eugenia Aubet, Tiro and the Phoenician colonies of the West, 2nd edition, Bellaterra, 1994, p. 217
6. ^ Noël 2014, p. 3
7. ^ Smith, Carthage and the Carthaginians (1878, 1902) at 13.
8. ^ Temehu.com. "Ancient History and Prehistory of Libya and the Sahara, from 55 million BC. to the present, early history of Libya". Temehu.com. Retrieved 9 January 2014.
9. ISBN 9783110082883
   .
10. ^ "Dido | Classical mythology". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 4 August 2017.
11. S2CID 163533512
    .
12. JSTOR 27924517
    .
13. ProQuest 1300698169
    .
14. ^ Cross 1972, p. 17, n. 11
15. ISBN 978-1-55540-527-4
    .
16. ^
    JSTOR 3296263
    . Retrieved 25 May 2022.
17. ^ Jack Finegan, Handbook of Biblical Chronology (rev. ed.: Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1998) 99.
18. ProQuest 1300698990
    .
19. ^ David Rohl, The Lords of Avaris (London: Century, 2007) 474.
20. ^ Edgeworth 1976.
21. ^ "Dido, Queen of Carthage | play by Marlowe and Nashe". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 4 August 2017.
22. ^ The Merchant of Venice, Act 5, Scene 1
23. ^ English Broadside Ballad Archive, ballad facsimile and full text
24. ^ Will Adams,The City of the Lost, HarperCollins, London, 2014, ISBN 978-0-00-742427-6
25. ^ "Dido, Mount". Geographic Names Information System. United States Geological Survey, United States Department of the Interior. Retrieved 19 January 2012.

Selected bibliography

• H. Akbar Khan, "Doctissima Dido": Etymology, Hospitality and the Construction of a Civilized Identity, 2002.
• Elmer Bagby Atwood, Two Alterations of Virgil in Chaucer's Dido, 1938.
• S. Conte, Dido sine veste, 2005.
• R. S. Conway
  , The Place of Dido in History, 1920.
• F. Della Corte, La Iuno-Astarte virgiliana, 1983.
• G. De Sanctis, Storia dei Romani, 1916.
• Edgeworth, R. J. (1976). "The Death of Dido". The Classical Journal. 72 (2): 129–133.
  JSTOR 3297083
  .
• M. Fantar, Carthage, la prestigieuse cité d'Elissa, 1970.
• L. Foucher, Les Phéniciens à Carthage ou la geste d'Elissa, 1978.
• Michael Grant, Roman Myths, 1973.
• M. Gras/P. Rouillard/J. Teixidor, L'univers phénicien, 1995.
• H.D. Gray, Did Shakespeare write a tragedy of Dido?, 1920.
• G. Herm, Die Phönizier, 1974.
• T. Kailuweit, Dido – Didon – Didone. Eine kommentierte Bibliographie zum Dido-Mythos in Literatur und Musik, 2005.
• R.C. Ketterer, The perils of Dido: sorcery and melodrama in Vergil's Aeneid IV and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, 1992.
• R.H. Klausen, Aeneas und die Penaten, 1839.
• G. Kowalski, De Didone graeca et latina, 1929.
• A. La Penna, Didone, in Enciclopedia Virgiliana, II, 1985, 48–57
• F.N. Lees, Dido Queen of Carthage and The Tempest, 1964.
• J.-Y. Maleuvre, Contre-Enquête sur la mort de Didon, 2003.
• J.-Y. Maleuvre, La mort de Virgile d’après Horace et Ovide, 1993;
• L. Mangiacapre, Didone non è morta, 1990.
• P.E. McLane, The Death of a Queen: Spencer's Dido as Elizabeth, 1954.
• O. Meltzer, Geschichte der Karthager, 1879.
• A. Michel, Virgile et la politique impériale: un courtisan ou un philosophe?, 1971.
• R.C. Monti, The Dido Episode and the Aeneid: Roman Social and Political Values in the Epic, 1981.
• S. Moscati, Chi furono i Fenici. Identità storica e culturale di un popolo protagonista dell'antico mondo mediterraneo, 1992.
• R. Neuse, Book VI as Conclusion to The Faerie Queene, 1968.
• Noël, Marie-Pierre (2014). Élissa, la Didon grecque, dans la mythologie et dans l'histoire [Elissa, the Greek Dido, in mythology and history]. Journée d'étude ”Les figures de Didon : de l'épopée antique au théâtre de la Renaissance”, lab. IRCL, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3, Montpellier, 10 janvier 2014 (in French). IRCL.
• Nolfo, Fabio (2015). "'Epigr. Bob.' 45 Sp. (= Ps. Auson. 2 pp. 420 s. Peip.): la palinodia di Didone negli 'Epigrammata Bobiensia' e la sua rappresentazione iconica". Sileno (in Italian). 41 (1–2): 277–304.
  OCLC 1121601459
  .
• Nolfo, Fabio (2018). "Su alcuni aspetti del movimento elegiaco di un epigramma tardoantico : la Dido Bobiensis" [On some aspects of the 'elegiac movement' of a late antique epigram: the 'Dido Bobiensis']. Vichiana (in Italian). 55 (2): 71–90.
  hdl:2268/264045
  .
• A. Parry, The Two Voices of Virgil's Aeneid, 1963.
• G.K. Paster, Montaigne, Dido and The Tempest: "How Came That Widow In?, 1984.
• B. Schmitz, Ovide, In Ibin: un oiseau impérial, 2004;
• E. Stampini, Alcune osservazioni sulla leggenda di Enea e Didone nella letteratura romana, 1893;
• A. Ziosi, Didone regina di Cartagine di Christopher Marlowe. Metamorfosi virgiliane nel Cinquecento, 2015;
• A. Ziosi, Didone. La tragedia dell'abbandono. Variazioni sul mito (Virgilio, Ovidio, Boccaccio, Marlowe, Metastasio, Ungaretti, Brodskij), 2017.

Primary sources

• Virgil, Aeneid i.338–368
• Justinus, Epitome Historiarum philippicarum Pompei Trogi xviii.4.1–6, 8

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Dido.

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article "Dido".

Selected English texts (Alternate links found in Wikipedia entries for the respective authors.)

• Forum Romanum: Justin 18.3f (Contains
  Justin
  (18.3–6) relating the early story of Elissa in full.)
• Translation of Virgil's works including the Aeneid by A. S. Kline
• Ovid's imagined letter from Dido to Aeneas, trans. Miceal F. Vaughan (See also Ovid.)
• Appian, The Punic Wars, chapter 1 (See also Appian.)
• Dido, Queen of Carthage Archived 1 September 1999 at the
  Chaucer
  's Legend of Dido
• The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, by Christopher Marlowe (and Thomas Nashe?). (See also Christopher Marlowe.)

Commentary

• Greek Mythology Link: Dido
• Queen Dido: Didone Liberata (Mostly about a new four-act play by Salvatore Conte; it contains also a confutation of the well-known suicide into a subjective vision of Aeneas and his "comites" – 4.664, followed by Dido's catabasis)
• Warburg Institute Iconographic Database (about 900 images related to the Aeneid – Dido appears in Books I and IV)