Dido (Queen of Carthage)

Aeneas recounting the Trojan War to Dido, a painting by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin. This scene is taken from Virgil's Aeneid, where Dido falls in love with, only to be left by, the Trojan hero Aeneas.

Dido (pronounced: /ˈdaɪdoʊ/) was, according to ancient Greek and Roman sources, the founder and first Queen of Carthage (in modern-day Tunisia). She is best known from the account given by the Roman poet Virgil in his Aeneid. In some sources she is also known as Alyssa (pronounced; /əˈlɪsə/).

Early accounts

Aeneid, Book IV, Death of Dido. From the Vergilius Vaticanus (Vatican Library, Cod. Vat. lat. 3225).

The person of Alyssa can be traced to references by Roman historians to lost writings of Timaeus of Tauromenium]] in Sicily (c.356–260 BCE).

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 and Carchedon is just the Greek form of Carthage. Timaeus made Carchedon's wife Alyssa the sister of King Pygmalion of Tyre. Archaeological evidence of settlement on the site of Carthage before the last quarter of the 8th century BCE has yet to be found. Paucity of material for this period may be explained by rejection of the Greek Dark Age theory. That the city is named 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 Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus in his Philippic histories as rendered in a digest or epitome made by Junianus Justinus in the 3rd century.

Justin quoting or paraphrasing Trogus states (18.4–6), a king of Tyre whom Justin does not name, made his very beautiful daughter Alyssa and son Pygmalion his joint heirs. But on his death the people took Pygmalion alone as their ruler though Pygmalion was yet still a boy. Alyssa married Acerbas her uncle who as priest of Hercules—that is, Melqart—was second in power to King Pygmalion. Acerbas (Sicharbas, Zacherbas) can be equated with the Zikarbaal king of Byblos mentioned in the Egyptian Tale of Wenamon. Rumor told that Acerbas had much wealth secretly buried and King Pygmalion had Acerbas murdered in hopes of gaining this wealth. Alyssa, desiring to escape Tyre, expressed a wish to move into Pygmalion's palace, but 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. Alyssa 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 Alyssa and her followers arrived on the coast of North Africa where Alyssa asked the Berber king Iarbas for a small bit of land for a temporary refuge until she could continue her journeying, only as much land as could be encompassed by an oxhide. They agreed. Alyssa cut the oxhide into fine strips so that she had enough to encircle an entire nearby hill, which was therefore afterwards named Byrsa "hide". (This event is commemorated in modern mathematics: The "isoperimetric problem" of enclosing the maximum area within a fixed boundary is often called the "Dido Problem" in modern Calculus of variations.) That would become their new home. Many of the local Berbers joined the settlement and both Berbers and envoys from the nearby Phoenician city of Utica 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. Accordingly, 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 Alyssa for his wife or he would make war on Carthage. Alyssa's envoys, fearing Iarbas, told Alyssa only that Iarbas' terms for peace were that someone from Carthage must dwell permanently with him to teach Phoenician ways and they added that of course no Carthaginian would agree to dwell with such savages. Alyssa condemned any who would feel that way when they should indeed give their lives for the city if necessary. Alyssa's envoys then explained that Iarbas had specifically requested Alyssa as wife. Alyssa was trapped by her words. But Alyssa 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, Alyssa 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 Alyssa was deified and was worshipped as long as Carthage endured. In this account, the foundation of Carthage occurred seventy-two years before the foundation of Rome.

Servius in his commentary on Virgil's Aeneid gives Sicharbas as the name of Alyssa's husband in early tradition.

Questions of historicity and dating

The oxhide story which explains the name of the hill must be 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 tradition though still not necessarily historical. Michael Grant in Roman Myths (1973) claims:

"That is to say, Dido-Elissa was originally a goddess."

It has been conjectured that she was first converted from a goddess into a human queen in some Greek work of the later fifth century BC.

But others conjecture that Elissa was indeed historical, as described in the following accounts.

It is not known who first combined the story of Elissa 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 BCE 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 BCE ) 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. On paleographic grounds, the stone is dated to the ninth century BCE. If Cross's interpretation is correct, this presents inscriptional evidence substantiating the existence of a 9th-century-BCE 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 BCE, with Ba‘al-‘azor (Phoenician form of the name) or Baal-Eser/Balazeros (Greek form of the name), Dido’s grandfather. 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 hypocoristicon or shortened form of the name that included only the divine element, so that the “Belus” that Virgil names as the father of Dido in the Aeneid may be a reference to her grandfather, Baal-Eser II/Balazeros.

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 first century BCE, and then later, the date most commonly used by Roman writers for the founding of Rome was 753 BCE. This would place Dido’s flight in 753 + 72 = 825 BCE. Another tradition, that of the Greek historian Timaeus (c. 345–260 BCE), gives 814 BCE 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 BCE 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 BCE 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 BCE, 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 BCE, 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 BCE when using the widely accepted date of 931/930 BCE 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 BCE 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 BCE, 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.

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 Aeneas. Aeneas fought in the Trojan War, which is conventionally dated anywhere from the 14th to the 12th centuries BCE, far too early for Aeneas to have been alive in the time of Dido. Even with the date of 864 BC that historical revisionist David Rohl gives for the end of the Trojan War, Aeneas would have been about 77 years old when Dido fled Tyre in 825 BCE and 88 when she began to build Carthage in 814 (following Peñuela's reconstruction), hardly consistent with the romantic intrigues between Dido and Aeneas imagined by Virgil in the Aeneid.

Virgil's Aeneid

Dido, attributed to Christophe Cochet, formerly at Château de Marly (Musée du 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 Belus II by later commentators to distinguish him from Belus son of Poseidon and Libya in earlier Greek mythology. If the story of Elissa/Dido has a factual basis and is synchronized properly with history than this Belus should stand for Mattan I, father of the historical Pygmalion.

Virgil (1.746f) adds that the marriage between Dido/Elissa and Sychaeus, as Virgil calls Dido's husband, occurred while her father was still alive. Pygmalion slew Sychaeus secretly 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. None of these details contradict 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)

Death of Dido, by Guercino, 1631.

Dido can no longer bear to live. (4.474) Dido 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 in 146 BCE.

(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 Elissa/Dido's final suicide. In both versions Elissa/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.

Later Roman tradition

Letter 7 of Ovid's Heroides is a feigned 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..

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 Augustan History ("Tyrrani Triginta" 27, 30) claims that Zenobia queen of Palmyrainthe late 3rd centuryCE was descended from Cleopatra, Dido and Semiramis.

Continuing tradition

In The Divine Comedy Dante sees 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.

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

• 1641 : La Didone by Francesco Cavalli
• 1656 : La Didone by Andrea Mattioli
• 1689 : Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell
• 1693 : Didon by Henry Desmarets
• 1707 : Dido, Königin von Carthago by Christoph Graupner
• 1724 : Didone abbandonata by Domenico Sarro
• 1740 : Didone abbandonata by Baldassare Galuppi
• 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

This legend also inspired the drama Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe.

In 1794 Germany, Charlotte von Stein wrote her own drama named Dido, with an autobiographical element - as von Stein had been forsaken by her own lover, the famous Goethe, in a manner which she found reminiscent of Aeneas.

Even today, Dido appears in Sid Meier's strategy games Civilization II and Civilization V, as the female leader of the Carthaginian tribe.

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 perimeter) but the sources mention the thong only and say nothing about the sea.

Carthage was the Roman Republic's greatest rival and enemy, and Virgil's Dido in part symbolises this. Even though no Rome existed in her day, Virgil's Dido curses the future progeny of the Trojans. In Italy under the Fascist regime, her figure was demonized, perhaps not only as an anti-Roman figure but because she represented together at least three other unpleasant qualities: feminine virtue, Semitic ethnic origin, and African civilization. As an innocuous example: when Mussolini's regime named the streets of new quarters in Rome with the characters of Virgil's Aeneid, only the name Dido did not appear.

In tragic compensation (in a sadly ironic way), the Royal Navy employed Dido-class cruisers against Italian objectives during the Second World War, seemingly a devastating justification of Fascist fears.

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.
• R.J. Edgeworth, "The Death of Dido." The Classical Journal 72.2 (1977) 129-33.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Primary sources

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

External links

• Selected English texts
  • 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 (See also Aeneid.)
  • Ovid's imagined letter from Dido to Aeneas, trans. Miceal F. Vaughan
  • Appian, The Punic Wars, chapter 1
  • Dido, Queen of Carthage, original text, modernization, and discussion of Chaucer's Legend of Dido
  • The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage, by Christopher Marlowe (and Thomas Nashe?).
• 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)

This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original article was at Dido (Queen of Carthage). The list of authors can be seen in the page history.