Dido (redirected from didoes)

Dido (dī`dō), in Roman mythology, queen of Carthage, also called Elissa. She was the daughter of a king of Tyre. After her brother Pygmalion murdered her husband, she fled to Libya, where she founded and ruled Carthage. According to one legend, Dido threw herself on a burning pyre to escape marriage to the king of Libya. In the Aeneid, Vergil tells how she fell in love with Aeneas, who had been shipwrecked at Carthage, and destroyed herself on the pyre when, at Jupiter's command, he left to continue his journey to Italy.

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Dido

In Greek legend, the founder of Carthage. She fled to North Africa after the murder of her husband and bought land from a local chieftain, Iarbas. She killed herself rather than marry him. Virgil altered the story in his Aeneid, in which Dido welcomes Aeneas to Carthage during his travels, becomes his lover, and kills herself when he abandons her.

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Dido

contracts for as much land as can be enclosed by an oxhide; by cutting it into a strip she obtains enough to found a city. [Rom. Legend: Collier’s VI, 259]

See : Cunning

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Dido

kills herself when Aeneas abandons her. [Rom. Myth.: Avery, 392–393; Rom. Lit.: Aeneid]

See : Suicide

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Dido

(also Elissa), in ancient mythology the sister of the king of Tyre (in Phoenicia). Founder of Carthage.

According to the Roman version of the myth as treated in Book IV of Vergil’s Aeneid, Dido fell in love with Aeneas, who was cast upon the shores of Carthage by a storm. After his departure she committed suicide. The figure of the lovesick and abandoned Dido has enjoyed great popularity through the centuries in literature, opera (H. Purcell, J. Haydn, and others), and painting (A. Mantegna, P. Rubens, S. Bourdon, H. Fiiger, and others).