Dido

From Citizendium
Revision as of 13:02, 20 February 2021 by imported>Pat Palmer (rewording the intro sentence)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This article is a stub and thus not approved.
Main Article
Discussion
Related Articles  [?]
Bibliography  [?]
External Links  [?]
Citable Version  [?]
 
This editable Main Article is under development and subject to a disclaimer.

In legend, Dido was an ancient Phoenician queen, and founder of Carthage, a city in modern day Tunisia which was later to become a prominent rival to Rome. Both ancient Greek and Roman sources describe her as Carthage's first queen. Carthage was directly opposite from Sicily, with only about seventy miles separating the two points of land, and as a natural dividing point between the the west and east parts of the Mediterranean Sea, it quickly grew in influence in Phoenician culture.

Dido is a prominent character in the Aeneid in which she is the lover of Aeneas, but she is forced to fall in love with him by the goddess Venus who casts a strong spell on her and undoes her heart. Dido had previously been married before she met Aeneas, and she swore an oath that she would never remarry. But her sister Anna helped persuade her to fall in love with Aeneas, but when fate forces Aeneas to head onwards to meet his destiny to found the city of Rome, Dido is angry, bitter, and hurt by the seeming nonchalance of Aeneas, and she commits suicide. Later in the epic story, Aeneas looks at the ghost of Dido in the underworld, but she won't even look at him, and walks away without saying a word. The Aeneas-Dido love story forms a major transition in the epic tale. According to some sources, Dido is also called by the name Elissa.

See also


References