On the morning after the banquet given in honor of Aeneas, Dido confides to Anna, her sister, that the Trojan warrior is the only man she has met since the death of her husband, Sychaeus, who could make her consider breaking her vow to remain faithful to his memory and never remarry. Urging the queen to act on these new, amorous feelings, Anna emphasizes that the dead do not care about the romantic lives of those they leave behind. She advises Dido to pursue the Trojan, both for the sake of her own happiness and for the future safety and prosperity of Carthage, which, Anna says, will be militarily strengthened by the Trojans’s remaining presence. Anna’s counsel increases Dido’s lust for Aeneas, but, unable to act on this passion, the queen languishes helplessly, neglecting her once-paramount project, the half-built new city of Carthage.
Dido and Aeneas’s relationship catches the attention of Juno and Venus. For very different reasons—Juno wants to delay Aeneas’s reaching Italy, and Venus wants to ensure his safety—the two goddesses jointly conspire to bring about a sexual union of the pair. While Aeneas and Dido are out hunting one day, Juno causes a torrential storm, and the pair seeks shelter in a cave, where they are sexually united. Dido tries to legitimatize the union by calling it a marriage.
News of the relationship spreads throughout Africa. King Iarbas, one of Dido’s rejected suitors, vents his anger in a prayer to Jupiter, who sends Mercury to Aeneas to remind the Trojan leader that he is shirking his heaven-appointed duty to found a new homeland: Aeneas must sail from Carthage at once. Shocked into action by Jupiter’s command, Aeneas gives secret orders for the ships to be made ready to sail, deciding to postpone notifying Dido of his intention to leave Carthage until the right occasion presents itself.
Dido, however, discovers Aeneas’s plan and violently berates him for concealing his intentions from her and for wanting to abandon her to her enemies. Aeneas declares that he did not intend to deceive her, and that he will never forget her, but he does not regard Dido and himself as married, and he must fulfill fate’s decrees. His attempt to justify himself only increases Dido’s anger. When she sees the preparations for departure going steadily ahead, she loses her pride and sends Anna to Aeneas to beg him to delay sailing until better weather, thus allowing her time to grow accustomed to his leaving. Anna does the queen’s bidding, going to Aeneas several times and bringing him to Dido, but Aeneas’s resolve to sail to Italy never wavers.
Full of despair and haunted by evil omens and nightmares, Dido secretly decides to kill herself. She asks Anna to prepare a pyre and to heap upon it all the items in the palace associated with Aeneas: These objects, she says, she will burn according to magic rites that will either restore him to her or free her of her love for him. In fact, however, the pyre is intended for burning herself as well as Aeneas’s belongings. Ignorantly, Anna does as Dido requests, believing that the queen’s grief is no greater than that which she suffered over her husband’s death. On top of the newly built pyre, Dido places a couch heaped with Aeneas’s clothing, a portrait of him, and his sword, with which she plans to kill herself.
That night, Dido sleeplessly considers her plight. Having ruled out the alternatives of marrying one of her former suitors or following the Trojans, she reaffirms her decision to commit suicide. Meanwhile, Aeneas, asleep aboard his ship and ready to sail the next day, is again visited by Mercury, who appears to him in a dream and commands him to flee while flight is still possible. To strengthen Aeneas’s resolve, Mercury deliberately speaks ill of Dido. Aroused, Aeneas gives orders to sail immediately, and soon the Trojan fleet is under way.
When dawn comes and Dido sees the Trojan fleet at sea, she is uncontrollably overcome by an all-consuming rage. She momentarily contemplates having the Trojans pursued; then, realizing that it is too late for this tactic, she curses them, praying that eternal hostility may exist between them and her own people, that some “avenging spirit” will right the wrong that has been done to her, and that Aeneas will “fall in battle before his time and lie / Unburied on the sand.”
Resigned now to death, Dido sends her dead husband’s old nurse to fetch Anna, pretending to need her sister’s assistance in completing magic rites. Once the nurse leaves on this errand, Dido mounts the pyre, lies down on the couch, and stabs herself with Aeneas’s sword. Anna arrives amidst the uproar of the household and gathers Dido into her arms, where the queen dies.
