Dido

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.

The oldest references to Dido are attributed to Timaeus, who lived in Taormina in Sicily, and died around 260 BC, which is about five centuries after the date given for the foundation of Carthage.

By his account, Dido founded Carthage in 814 BC, around the same time as the foundation of Rome, and he alluded to the growing conflict between the two cities in his own day.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Dido cut the oxhide into fine strips so that she had enough to encircle an entire nearby hill, which was therefore afterwards named Byrsa ("hide").

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.

A fragment of an epic poem by Gnaeus Naevius who died at Utica in 201 BC 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 BC ) for a version in which Dido's sister Anna killed herself for love of Aeneas.

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."

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.

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.

[19] 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.

Even with the date of 864 BC that historical revisionist David Rohl gives for the end of the Trojan War,[20] Aeneas would have been about 77 years old when Dido fled Tyre in 825 BC 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.

Classicist T. T. Duke suggests that this is a hypocoristicon of the historical father of Pygmalion and Dido, Mattan I, also known as MTN-BʿL (Matan-Baʿal, 'Gift of the Lord').

(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.

(4.666) 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.

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.

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.

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 Palmyra in the late third century, was descended from Cleopatra, Dido and Semiramis.

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.

[24] William Shakespeare refers to Dido twelve times in his plays: four times in The Tempest, albeit all in one dialogue, twice in Titus Andronicus, and also in Henry VI Part 2, Antony and Cleopatra, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream and, most famously, in The Merchant of Venice, 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.

In Adams' account, the startling discovery of Dido's hideout and her well-preserved body happens accidentally during an attempted Coup D'etat by Turkish Army officers based in Cyprus.

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.