Book I also introduces Dido, one of the poem's three main characters. The portrait that Virgil presents of the Carthaginian queen rivals Aeneas's, although later in the poem our opinion of her will slightly lessen. In Book I, her stature is as noble as her Trojan counterpart, in part due to the similarities between the two. Like Aeneas, Dido fled her homeland under the most trying of circumstances. The story of Dido's personal history, which increases our sympathy for her, rivals the account Aeneas will relate in the following books for its exemplum of noble suffering. Aeneas notes longingly the building of Dido's city, and especially the laws that ensure order in Carthaginian society, an order that he himself so desperately wants for his own people. When we meet the queen, Virgil compares her to the goddess Diana, the great huntress; when Aeneas materializes from the cloud that his mother has shrouded him in, his head and shoulders appear "noble as a god's." And finally, Aeneas notes that Dido is a fair and just ruler of her people, as he himself strives to be. Both characters represent the best of their races. Unfortunately, their relationship is doomed from the start, partly because of Juno and Venus's manipulation of them, and because Aeneas cannot be waylaid indefinitely from his rightful destiny.
Virgil did not invent the episode of Aeneas's visit to Carthage, but it appears likely that the fateful encounter between the hero and Dido, their passionate attachment, and his eventual god-ordained abandonment of her are essentially Virgil's own creation. In an earlier legend recorded by the Greek writer Timaeus, Dido commits suicide rather than marry her suitor, Iarbas, the king whose prayers in Book IV of the Aeneid alert Jupiter to Aeneas's overextending his stay in Carthage. According to another legend, which was adopted by Varro, a writer of the first century B.C., it was Dido's sister, Anna, who killed herself for love of Aeneas. Virgil reshapes these stories to provide a tragic and poignant explanation for the enmity that existed between Carthage and Rome.
