Virgil's portrayal of Dido in Book IV is one of the great literary character studies in all of literature. Dido finally knows, as do we, that she is doomed to fail in her conquest of Aeneas, yet we applaud her resourcefulness in facing down her destiny. Her begging at the beginning of Book IV for the earth to swallow her before she falls deeper into passion's indomitable grip is balanced by a similar self-recognition of her plight toward the book's end, when she asks of herself, "What am I saying? Where am I? What madness / Takes me out of myself? Dido, poor soul, / Your evil doing has come home to you." Tragically, no matter how much she is aware of the danger her passion presents, she cannot prevent her own psychological demise.
In some ways, Dido, like Turnus, her male counterpart in the second half of the Aeneid, is even more heroic than Aeneas. After all, Aeneas eventually learns that fate is on his side no matter how difficult his journey may be. Dido and Turnus, however, are heroic without this assurance, most of all at the moment of their deaths.
Stylistically, Virgil reinforces Dido's inability to control her passion by imagining her as a fire that grows and cannot be quenched. The book's first lines characterize this gnawing, excruciating lust: "The queen, for her part, all that evening ached / With longing that her heart's blood fed, a wound / Or inward fire eating her away." And when Dido discovers Aeneas's intent to leave her city, she becomes "all aflame / With rage." Her burning passion for the Trojan warrior is so great that she becomes physically sick. Fittingly, she dies on a pyre, used for burning corpses in funeral rites. However, her inner flame has been extinguished by her own hand; there is no reason to light the pyre now.
