Question

Who was Dido, what role does she play in the Aeneid and how has she been portrayed in art? Look at all art forms - for example, opera, paintings and sculptures - and include an image or a link to what you found.

Answer 1

Dido, also called Elissa, in Greek legend, the reputed founder of Carthage, daughter of the Tyrian king Mutto (or Belus), and wife of Sychaeus (or Acerbas). ... Dido fell in love with Aeneas after his landing in Africa, and Virgil attributes her suicide to her abandonment by him at the command of Jupiter.

Dido plays a role in the first four books of the epic similar to that which Turnus plays at the end. She is a figure of passion and volatility, qualities that contrast with Aeneas’s order and control, and traits that Virgil associated with Rome itself in his own day. Dido also represents the sacrifice Aeneas makes to pursue his duty. If fate were to allow him to remain in Carthage, he would rule a city beside a queen he loves without enduring the further hardships of war. Aeneas encounters Dido’s shade in the underworld just before the future legacy of Rome is revealed to him, and again he admits that his abandonment of the queen was not an act of his own will. This encounter with lost love, though poignant, is dwarfed by Anchises’s subsequent revelation of the glory of Rome. Through Dido, Virgil affirms order, duty, and history at the expense of romantic love.

The Aeneid and shows Dido and Aeneas about to take refuge in a cave. In Roman mythology Dido was the queen who founded Carthage. Aeneas was a refugee from Troy after its destruction by the Greeks. He landed on the shores of Dido’s realm in the search of a new homeland for himself. When working on this painting Jones used a dark grey primer, which makes the stormy sky seem especially gloomy. The painting is dense with multiple layers and only the figures of the central characters and the patch of sunlight falling on the surface of the distant sea were executed with light, translucent brushstrokes. The large number of engravings produced of this picture made it famous beyond Britain and only 17 years after its creation, the Landscape with Dido and Aeneas found its way to Russia. The painting was purchased for Prince Grigory Potemkin and after his death it became part of Empress Catherine II’s Hermitage collection.