Dido (Elissa)
Dido is the legendary founder and first queen of Carthage, known chiefly from Roman literature and from fragments of Greek historians. Also called Elissa, she is presented as a princess of Tyre, the daughter of a Phoenician king, and her story is set in the ninth century BC — the traditional date for Carthage's founding is 814 BC. The Greek account, preserved through Timaeus and Justin, has her brother Pygmalion murder her wealthy husband Acerbas, a priest of Melqart, for his gold. Dido fled with a party of followers and the treasure, and after stopping in Cyprus reached the coast of North Africa. There she asked the local ruler for as much land as could be covered by an oxhide. He agreed, and she had the hide cut into strips so fine that they enclosed an entire hill — the citadel afterwards called Byrsa, which the Greeks connected with their word for hide. It is a folk etymology, since the name is more probably from a Phoenician word for citadel, but the story is old. In this version she killed herself on a pyre rather than marry a Numidian king, preserving loyalty to her dead husband. Virgil reworked it in the Aeneid, making her the lover of Aeneas, who abandons her on divine instruction to found Rome. She curses his descendants before killing herself with his sword, and Virgil uses the episode to give the Punic Wars a mythological origin. The chronology is impossible — Troy fell some four centuries before Carthage was founded — and was not intended as history. Her afterlife runs through Ovid, Chaucer, Marlowe, Purcell and Berlioz.
- Lived: 850 BCE – 759 BCE
- Nationality: Phoenician
- Roles: queen, founder
