The woman Paris won was Helen, the wife of the Greek Menelaus, king of Sparta. When Paris and Helen eloped, Menelaus attempted peacefully to have her returned to him. However, when these attempts failed, he and his brother, Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, assembled a fleet of a thousand ships and an enormous army, and the war against Troy began.
The bitter hatred that existed between the Greeks and the Trojans seemed too great for Virgil to explain without including a supernatural reason for it. His contemporary readers would have been certain that when, in Book IV, Queen Dido of Carthage curses the Trojans and calls for a hero to avenge Aeneas's abandoning her, she is referring unwittingly to the great Carthaginian general Hannibal, who with his warriors and elephants laid waste to Italy for more than fourteen years during the Second Punic War. In all, there were three Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome: the First Punic War (264–241 B.C.), the Second Punic War (218–201 B.C.), and the Third Punic War (149–146 B.C.), which ended with Carthage's destruction. For Virgil's readers, all three of these wars would have seemed like the fulfillment, in far later times, of Dido's curse.
In the years that followed Carthage's destruction, Rome waged war victoriously against foreign powers that stood in the way of her irresistible drive toward domination, notably kingdoms that had been parts of Alexander the Great's empire: Syria, Macedonia, and Egypt. The wars against Macedonia, four in all, finally brought Greece under Rome's complete control.
