Carthage- Roman LocationLocation · Landmark"City of Dido"

The Ox-Hide

Dido fled Tyre after her brother Pygmalion murdered her husband Sychaeus for his wealth. She sailed west with a band of followers and landed on the North African coast. The local king offered her as much land as an ox-hide could cover. Dido cut the hide into the thinnest possible strips and enclosed enough ground to build a citadel. The Romans called it the Byrsa, hearing the Greek word for hide. Around that fortress rose Kart-Hadasht, the "New City" in Phoenician, which grew into Carthage. Juno favored the city above all others and hoped it would rule the world.

The Cave

Aeneas arrived by shipwreck, blown off course by Juno's storms as he sailed toward Italy. Venus and Juno, working at cross-purposes, conspired to bring Aeneas and Dido together. During a royal hunt a sudden storm drove the two into the same cave, and there the affair began.

Aeneas stayed. He helped Dido build her city and lived as though he were her consort. Then Mercury came down from Jupiter with a single message: Italy. Aeneas prepared to leave in secret. Dido discovered the plan and confronted him, but he sailed anyway. She mounted a funeral pyre built from his belongings, spoke her curse, and fell on his sword.

The Curse

From the pyre Dido called for an avenger to rise from her people and harry the descendants of Troy with fire and sword. Virgil's Roman audience knew who she meant. Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephants, burned his way through Italy for sixteen years, and nearly destroyed Rome. Silius Italicus, in the Punica, has Hannibal swear his childhood oath of hatred at the altar of the Carthaginian gods. He bound himself to the dead queen's rage before he was old enough to hold a sword.

Rome destroyed Carthage in 146 BCE, burned it, and sowed the ground. In Virgil's telling, the city had been doomed from the moment Aeneas left the cave. Everything that followed was the working-out of a broken promise.