A City Born of Grief

Virgil’s Aeneid, written between 26 and 19 B.C., is Rome’s national epic. It tells how a band of Trojans, commanded by Aeneas, escapes by sea after the bloody Trojan War; the descendants of these men are the founders of Rome. The Aeneid also tells of the nearly simultaneous founding of Carthage and of Aeneas’s brief sojourn there, in the arms of Queen Dido.

Aeneas and his men sail west, encounter a furious storm and wash up on the shores of Africa. Aeneas’s tutelary goddess (and mother), Venus, then appears before the men in the guise of a huntress and tells them where they have foundered:

”You see a Punic country, men of Tyre …

Our ruler here is Dido, she who left

her city when she had to flee her brother …

Her husband was Sychaeus: the wealthiest

landowner in Phoenicia. For her father

had given her, a virgin, to Sychaeus

and joined them with the omens of first marriage.

Unhappy Dido loved him with much passion.

Pygmalion, her brother, held the kingdom

of Tyre; beyond all men he was a monster

in crime. Between Sychaeus and her brother

dividing fury came. Pygmalion—

unholy, blind with lust for gold—in secret

now catches Dido’s husband off his guard

and cuts him down by sword before the altars,

heedless of his own sister’s love …

And Dido, moved by this, prepared her flight

and her companions. Now there come together

both those who felt fierce hatred for the tyrant