A Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country/Dido
Dido, detesting the execrable deed, and desirous to disappoint him of the expected fruit of his crime, lulled his suspicions to sleep till she had all things in readiness, and then privately eloped with her sister Anna, the flower of the Tyrian youth, and her most valuable effects.
After a long series of disastrous events, she landed on the coast of the Mediterranean, at a little distance from the place where the city of Tunis now stands. There, having purchased some land of the natives, she settled a colony of those who had followed her fortunes, B. C. 888. The natives of the country, invited by a prospect of gain, soon resorted to the strangers with the necessaries of life, and such other commodities as were most wanted. Finding themselves always civilly treated, they gradually incorporated themselves with them, and became one people. After a time, the citizens of Utica also, beginning to consider them as countrymen, sent ambassadors, with considerable presents, exhorting them to build a city on the place where they first landed. This proposal being agreeable to the secret wishes of Dido, and her infant colony, it was begun, and called Carthada, or Carthage, which, in the Phœnician language, signified the New City.
What Virgil has related concerning this princess, is only to be considered as a poetical fiction; since it appears that she lived at least two hundred years before the time of his hero, Æneas; and, at last finished her days, not, as he represents, a victim to love, but to conjugal fidelity, it being then considered criminal to marry a second time. Dido was courted by Jarbas, king of Getulia, who threatened her with war in case of a refusal. Her subjects also urged her to accept his hand; and she foresaw that she should either be obliged to violate her vows to Sichæus, or bring a powerful enemy on her infant colony. To extricate herself therefore from the difficulty, she threw herself upon a funeral pile, to which she had previously set fire, and that her subjects had erected, unconscious of the purpose to which she meant to apply it.
When we consider that a city, which soon became the first in arts and commerce, and the second in power, owed its political existence to Dido; that, during her life, she governed it with so much prudence, and, at her death, made so disinterested a sacrifice for its safety; we must class her in the first rank of heroines.