page_title: Dido
section_title: Early accounts
hierarchical_section_title: Dido / Early accounts
context_page_description: Dido, also known as Alyssa or Elissa, was the legendary founder and first queen of the Phoenician city-state of Carthage, located in modern Tunisia. Known only through ancient Greek and Roman sources, most of which were written well after Carthage's founding, her historicity remains uncertain. In most accounts, she was the queen of the Phoenician city-state of Tyre, today Ṣūr in Lebanon, who flees her tyranny to found her own city in northwest Africa.
  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, 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 popular culture, featured in plays, artworks, and other media into the 21st century.
context_section_description: 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).
  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. Paucity of material for this period may be explained by rejection of the Greek Dark Age theory.
  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 Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus in his Philippic histories as rendered in a digest or epitome made by Junianus Justinus in the 3rd century AD.
  Justin quoting or paraphrasing Trogus states (18.4–6), a king of Tyre whom Justin does not name, made his very beautiful daughter Dido 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. Dido married Acerbas her uncle who as priest of Heracles—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. Dido, 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. 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 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. 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". (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 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 he
caption: Aeneid, Book IV, Death of Dido. From the Vergilius Vaticanus (Vatican Library, Cod. Vat. lat. 3225).
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